Sonnets

I

WHY, Love, beneath the fields of asphodel
Where youth lies buried, goest thou wandering,
And like a rainbow droops thy irised wing
Above the dead on whom sweet passion fell?
There thy eternal incarnations dwell;
There bends Narcissus o’er the beauteous spring;
There to the lovely soil doth Hyacinth cling.
Ay me! when young, I breathed the Ægean spell.

Once voyaged I — Europe, Asia on each hand —
To the inaccessible, dim, holy main;
Beautiful Ida wooed me, misty, grand;
Scamander shouted music in my brain;
And in the darkness, in the Trojan land,
I heard my horses champing golden grain.

II

O ecstasy of the remembering heart
That makes of all time but one stretchèd day,
And brings us forward on life’s glorious way
An hour or two before we shall depart!
And thus the whole world melts to timeless art,
And we in the eternal moment stay;
That is accomplishèd for which men pray,
And blunted is the ever-fatal dart.

Among the flowering ruins of old time
I played with beauty’s fragments; Death and Hope
Upon the dizzy stone beheld me climb
And in the acanthus-mantled marble grope;
I only heard the dawn Memnonian chime
’Mid the wild grasses and wild heliotrope.