L'ENVOI. You shake your head. A random string Your finer female sense offends. Well were it not a pleasant thing To fall asleep with all one's friends; To pass with all our social ties. To silence from the paths of men; And every hundred years to rise And learn the world, and sleep again; To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars, On secrets of the brain, the stars, And all that else the years will show, Titanic forces taking birth In divers seasons, divers climes; For we are Ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times. So sleeping, so aroused from sleep Ah, yet would I — and would I might! So much your eyes my fancy take Be still the first to leap to light That I might kiss those eyes awake! For, am I right or am I wrong, To choose your own you did not care; You'd have my moral from the song, And I will take my pleasure there: And, am I right or am I wrong, My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', To search a meaning for the song, Perforce will still revert to you; Nor finds a closer truth than this All-graceful head, so richly curl'd, And evermore a costly kiss The prelude to some brighter world. For since the time when Adam first Embraced his Eve in happy hour, And every bird of Eden burst In carol, every bud to flower, What eyes, like thine, have waken'd hopes ? Where on the double rosebud droops Which lets thee neither hear nor see: But break it. In the name of wife, And in the rights that name may give, Are clasp'd the moral of thy life, And that for which I care to live. EPILOGUE. So, Lady Flora, take my lay, O whisper to your glass, and say, "What wonder, if he thinks me fair? What wonder I was all unwise, To shape the song for your delight Like long-tail'd birds of Paradise, That float thro' Heaven, and cannot light? Or old-world trains, upheld at court By Cupid-boys of blooming hueBut take it earnest wed with sport, And either sacred unto you. AMPHION. My father left a park to me, But it is wild and barren, A garden too with scarce a tree Yet say the neighbours when they call, And in it is the germ of all That grows within the woodland. O had I lived when song was great And ta'en my fiddle to the gate, Nor cared for seed or scion ! |