Poem by Digby Mackworth Dolben

A Song of Eighteen

Strain them, O winds, the sails of the years,
 Outspread on the mystic sea;
Faster and faster, for laughter or tears,
 O bear my story to me!
Waft it, O Love, on thy purple wings,
 The dawn is breaking to pass:
Strike it, O Life, from thy deeper strings,
 And drown the music that was.

Yet lovely the tremulous haze
That curtained the dreamful afar,
Thro' the which some face, like a star,
Would lighten, too sudden for praise.
And white were our loves on their way
As morn on the hills of the south;
The kisses that rounded their mouth
As fresh as the grasses in May.

They passed; but the silvery pain
Of our tears was easily told,—
For the day but an hour was old,
At noon we should meet them again.

Weary am I of ideal and of mist,
 The shroud of life that is dead;—
And, as the passionate sculptor who kissed
 The lips of marble to red,
Ask I a breath that is part of my own,
 Yet drawn from a soul more sweet;—
Or, as the shaft that upsoareth alone
 Undiademed, incomplete,
Claim I the glory predestined to me
 In the Mother Builder's will,
Portion and place in the Temple to be
 Till the age her times fulfil.

1. Requests
2. Methought, through Many Years and Lands
3. Dinae Munusculum
4. Homo Factus Est
5. There Was One Who Walked in Shadow

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