Читать книгу Poems - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 6

  O Maytime woods! O Maytime lanes and hours!

  And stars, that knew how often there at night

  Beside the path, where woodbine odors blew

  Between the drowsy eyelids of the dusk,—

  When, like a great, white, pearly moth, the moon

  Hung silvering long windows of your room,—

  I stood among the shrubs! The dark house slept.

  I watched and waited for—I know not what!—

  Some tremor of your gown: a velvet leaf's

  Unfolding to caresses of the Spring:

  The rustle of your footsteps: or the dew

  Syllabling avowal on a tulip's lips

  Of odorous scarlet: or the whispered word

  Of something lovelier than new leaf or rose—

  The word young lips half murmur in a dream:

  Serene with sleep, light visions weigh her eyes:

       And underneath her window blooms a quince.

  The night is a sultana who doth rise

       In slippered caution, to admit a prince,

  Love, who her eunuchs and her lord defies.

  Are these her dreams? or is it that the breeze

       Pelts me with petals of the quince, and lifts

  The Balm-o'-Gilead buds? and seems to squeeze

       Aroma on aroma through sweet rifts

  Of Eden, dripping through the rainy trees.

  Along the path the buckeye trees begin

       To heap their hills of blossoms.—Oh, that they

  Were Romeo ladders, whereby I might win

       Her chamber's sanctity!—where dreams must pray

  About her soul!—That I might enter in!—

  A dream,—and see the balsam scent erase

       Its dim intrusion; and the starry night

  Conclude majestic pomp; the virgin grace

       Of every bud abashed before the white,

  Pure passion-flower of her sleeping face.