Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

WHEN SUMMER EVEN SOFTLY DIES by FREDERICK WILLIAM HENRY MYERS

Last Line: How babe and mother clasp and kiss
Subject(s): SEA; LOVE; MOTHERS; CHILDREN;
WHEN summer even softly dies,
When summer winds are free,
A thousand lamps, a thousand eyes,
Shall glimmer in the sea:
O look how large, behind, below,
The lucid creatures glance and glow!
They strew with soft and fiery foam
Her streaming way from home to home.

So shines the deep, but high above,
Beyond the cloudy bars,
The old infinity of love
Looks silent from the stars:
When parted friends no more avail
Those sleepless watchers shall not fail,
They learn her looks, they list her sighs,
They love her soft beseeching eyes.

Then in the woman's heart is born
The child's delight anew,
The Highland glory of the morn,
The rowans bright with dew;
She hears the flooding stream that falls
By those ancestral castle-walls,
Her father's woods are tossing free
Between her and the southern sea.

Or lovely in a lovely place
One offers as she stands
Sister to sister sweet embrace
And hospitable hands;
White-robed as once in happy hours
She stood a rose among the flowers,
And heart to heart would speak and tell
The reason why we loved her well.

So in a dream the nights go by,
So in a dream the days,
Till, when the good ship knows anigh
The Asian waterways,
From home to home her love shall set
And hope be stronger than regret,
And rest renew and prayer control
Her sweet unblemishable soul.

The waves subside; she stems at last
That Hellespontine stream;
Her ocean-dreams are overpast,
Or is this too a dream?
For child and husband, fast and fain,
Have clasped her in their arms again:
Let only mothers murmur this,
How babe and mother clasp and kiss.



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