Lines II
THOU camest with the coming Spring!
With swallows, and the murmuring
Of unloosed waters, with the birth
Of daisies dimpling the green earth.
And when the perfect rose of June
Responded to the golden noon,
My heart's deep core, suffused with bliss,
Broke into flower beneath thy kiss.
But now the swallows seaward fly,
The winds in chorus wail, 'Good-bye!'
The dead leaves whirl, and like a leaf
My heart shakes on the gusts of grief.
And yet awhile earth's flowerless breast
In lethal folds of snow will rest;
On thee too heart, with all thy woe,
Death falls one day like falling snow.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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Cedars Of Lebanon At Warwick Castle
CEDARS of Lebanon! Labyrinths of Shade,
Making a mystery of open day;
With layers of gloom keeping the Sun at bay,
And solemn boughs which never bloom or fade.
Contemporaries of that great Crusade,
When militant Christendom leaped up one day,
Fired by the Cross, and rushing to the fray,
Poured Eastward as oracular Peter bade.
Borne hither when Christ's Sepulchre was won,
And planted by hoar Warwick's feudal walls,
You grew, o'ershadowing every rival stem.
When English woods don May's fresh coronals,
Say,--Mourn ye still lost Jerusalem,
Funeral trees--beloved of Lebanon?
poem by Mathilde Blind
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Time's Shadow
Thy life, O Man, in this brief moment lies:
Time's narrow bridge whereon we darkling stand,
With an infinitude on either hand
Receding luminously from our eyes.
Lo, there thy Past's forsaken Paradise
Subsideth like some visionary strand,
While glimmering faint, the Future's promised land,
Illusive from the abyss, seems fain to rise.
This hour alone Hope's broken pledges mar,
And joy now gleams before, now in our rear,
Like mirage mocking in some waste afar,
Dissolving into air as we draw near.
Beyond our steps the path is sunny-clear,
The shadow lying only where we are.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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The Moat
AROUND this lichened home of hoary peace,
Invulnerable in its glassy moat,
A breath of ghostly summers seems to float
And murmur mid the immemorial trees.
The tender slopes, where cattle browse at ease,
Swell softly, like a pigeon's emerald throat;
And, self-oblivious, Time forgets to note
The flight of velvet-footed centuries.
The very sunlight hushed within the close,
Sleeps indolently by the Yew's slow shade;
Still as a relic some old Master made
The jewelled peacock's rich enamel glows;
And on yon mossy wall that youthful rose
Blooms like a rose that never means to fade.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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The After-Glow
It is a solemn evening, golden-clear--
The Alpine summits flame with rose-lit snow
And headlands purpling on wide seas below,
And clouds and woods and arid rocks appear
Dissolving in the sun's own atmosphere
And vast circumference of light, whose slow
Transfiguration--glow and after-glow--
Turns twilight earth to a more luminous sphere.
Oh heart, I ask, seeing that the orb of day
Has sunk below, yet left to sky and sea
His glory's spiritual after-shine:
I ask if Love, whose sun hath set for thee,
May not touch grief with his memorial ray,
And lend to loss itself a joy divine?
poem by Mathilde Blind
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O Moon
O moon, large golden summer moon,
Hanging between the linden trees,
Which in the intermittent breeze
Beat with the rhythmic pulse of June!
O night-air, scented through and through
With honey-coloured flower of lime,
Sweet now as in that other time
When all my heart was sweet as you!
The sorcery of this breathing bloom
Works like enchantment in my brain,
Till, shuddering back to life again,
My dead self rises from its tomb.
And, lovely with the love of yore,
Its white ghost haunts the moon-white ways;
But, when it meets me face to face,
Flies trembling to the grave once more.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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A Symbol
Hurrying for ever in their restless flight
The generations of earth's teeming womb
Rise into being and lapse into the tomb
Like transient bubbles sparkling in the light;
They sink in quick succession out of sight
Into the thick insuperable gloom
Our futile lives in flashing by illume--
Lightning which mocks the darkness of the night.
Nay--but consider, though we change and die,
If men must pass shall Man not still remain?
As the unnumbered drops of summer rain
Whose changing particles unchanged on high,
Fixed, in perpetual motion, yet maintain
The mystic bow emblazoned on the sky.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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Beauty
Even as on some black background full of night
And hollow storm in cloudy disarray,
The forceful brush of some great master may
More brilliantly evoke a higher light;
So beautiful, so delicately white,
So like a very metaphor of May,
Your loveliness on my life's sombre grey
In its perfection stands out doubly bright.
And yet your beauty breeds a strange despair,
And pang of yearning in the helpless heart;
To shield you from time's fraying wear and tear,
That from yourself yourself would wrench apart,
How save you, fairest, but to set you where
Mortality kills death in deathless art?
poem by Mathilde Blind
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Analkh
Like a great rock which looming o'er the deep
Casts his eternal shadow on the strands,
And veiled in cloud inexorably stands,
While vaulting round his adamantine steep
Embattled breakers clamorously leap,
Sun-garlanded and hope-uplifted bands,
But soon with waters shattered in the sands
Slowly recoiling back to ocean creep:
So sternly dost thou tower above us, Fate!
For still our eager hearts exultant beat,
Borne in the hurrying tide of life elate,
And dashing break against thy marble feet.
But would Hope's rainbow-aureole round us fleet,
Without these hurtling shocks of man's estate?
poem by Mathilde Blind
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Welcome to Egypt
The Palms stood motionless as Pyramids
Against the golden halo of the sky;
Interminable crops of wheat and rye
Mantled the plain with downy coverlids
Of silken green, where little freckled kids
Frolicked beneath the staid maternal eye;
And babe-led buffaloes plashed trampling by,
Sprinkling cool water on their dusty lids.
Spake the grave Arab, as his flashing glance
Swept the large, luminous verdure's dewy sheen,
Sedately, with a bronze-like countenance:
"Nehârak Saîd! Lo, this happy day,
My country decks herself in sumptuous green,
And smiling welcome, Lady, bids you stay."
poem by Mathilde Blind
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