AH, no! You never loved the Muse, Then wherefore should the Muse love you? Immortal maiden, free to choose, She does as the Immortals do. By amber morns and red moon-rises She roams the land in fair disguises, And hears the happy shepherd woo. The twilight's solitary tongue, The May-time and the flowering thorn, Old songs of poets newly sung, Old oaths of lovers newly sworn, Are sweet to her who ne'er remembers How every fire will leave but embers, And knows not that the world's outworn. The joy of larks that greet the day, The long cry of the nightingale, Are hers, as up the eastern way She meets the air of dawn, the frail First sunbeams on the dewy grasses, And ever singing, singing passes To bid him come who cannot fail. Ere yet she stands beside his door Out leaps the shepherd, morning-young. "O maid, where have we met before? Where did you learn the song you sung?" So hand in hand with mingled tresses And happy sighs and half-caresses, They dream the quiet fields among. At eve, when sifted snows are white, By solitary ways she goes. The lonely house upon the height, The lonely hearth and him she knows. The dying embers drop together, Cold, cold without the wintry weather, And on his hair lie chiller snows. She flits about the shadowed room. "O art thou Age, thou hooded guest, Or Death?" he questions in the gloom: And then his head is on her breast. The roof-tree buds, the roses cover The Muse, the young triumphant lover, The happy shepherd she has blest. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...DANAIDES: THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND EARTH by AESCHYLUS WEST END FAIR by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE by PAKENHAM THOMAS BEATTY NEW YEAR'S VERSES FOR THE CARRIER OF THE MIRROR, 1826 by JOHN GARDINER CALKINS BRAINARD DRAMATIC IDYLS: 2ND SERIES. PROLOGUE by ROBERT BROWNING AUNT JANE by AMELIA JOSEPHINE BURR VERNAL MAGIC by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON THE HUE AND THE CRY AFTER SIR JOHN PRESBYTER by JOHN CLEVELAND |