Longing and Absence

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

O my floating life Do not save love to the flood

I have so fiercely dreamed of you And walked so far and spoken of you so, Loved a shade of you so hard That now I’ve no more left of you.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose garden.

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying Unbroken wings. And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices And the weak spirit quickens to rebel For the bent goldenrod and the lost sea smell.

It was the last nostalgia: that he Should understand.

Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ eastward to the sea, There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me; For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say: “Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”

My sad heart foams at the stern. 4

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

When I set out for Lyonnesse, A hundred miles away, The rime was on the spray, And starlight lit my lonesomeness.

It’s a song of a merryman, moping mum, Whose soul was sad, and whose glance was glum, Who sipped no sup, and who craved no crumb, As he sighed for the love of a lady.

Dying! To be afraid of thee One must to thine Artillery Have left exposed a Friend— Than thine old Arrow is a Shot Delivered straighter to the Heart The leaving Love behind.

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.

But often in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life.

A solitary sail that rises White in the blue mist on the foam— What is it in far lands it prizes? What does it leave behind at home?

Never the time and the place And the loved one all together!

Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine— A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine.

And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy gray eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams— In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams.

The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.

Like the dew on the mountain, Like the foam on the river, Like the bubble on the fountain, Thou art gone, and forever!

The music in my heart I bore Long after it was heard no more.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a lover’s head! “O mercy!” to myself I cried, “If Lucy should be dead!”

O Mary, at thy window be! It is the wish’d, the trysted hour.