Forevermore.

I     O heart that vainly follows     The flight of summer swallows,     Far over holts and hollows,      O'er frozen buds and flowers;     To violet seas and levels,     Where Love Time's locks dishevels     With merry mimes and revels      Of aphrodisiac Hours.     II     O Love who, dreaming, borrows     Dead love from sad to-morrows,     The broken heart that sorrows,      The blighted hopes that weep;     Pale faces pale with sleeping;     Red eyelids red with weeping;     Dead lips dead secrets keeping,      That shake the deeps of sleep!     III     O Memory that showers     About the withered hours     White, ruined, sodden flowers,      Dead dust and bitter rain;     Dead loves with faces teary;     Dead passions wan and dreary;     The weary, weary, weary,      Dead heart-ache and the pain!     IV     O give us back the blisses,     Lost madness of moist kisses,     The youth, the joy, the tresses,      The fragrant limbs of white;     The high heart like a jewel     Alive with subtle fuel,     Lips beautiful and cruel,      Eyes' incarnated light!     V      Instead of tears, wild laughter      The old hot passions after,      The houri sweets that dafter      Made flesh and soul a slave!      Enough of tearful sorrows;      Enough of rank to-morrows;     The life that whines and borrows      But memories of the grave!     VI     The grave that breaks no netting     Of care or spint's fretting,     No long, long sweet forgetting      For those who would forget;     And those who stammer by it     Hope of an endless quiet,     Within them voiceless riot      When they and it have met.     VII     And God we pray beseeching, -     But Life with finger reaching,     Stone-stern, remaineth teaching      Our hearts to turn to stone;     Then fain are we to follow     The last, lorn, soaring swallow     Past bourns of holt and hollow      Forevermore alone.