Eleanor Farjeon

Wild Hyacinth

Delicate tangle of beauty that flows from the bowl of the
    May-green wood
Leading the lingering heart out of love in a transport to tremulous
    tears,
When the West wind runs a luminous wave through your bells and your
    sensitive spears
    It is earth I behold a light with a heavenly mood:
Blue fires, blue floods, that shimmer and swim in a haze in the
    heart of the wood.

I have seen innocent beauty that made my spirit to laugh aloud
As joy danced over my soul like light that travels a fine-rippled
    sea;
I have seen awfullest beauty that struck into dumbness the senses
    of me
    As under its folded wings my spirit lay bowed;
But you seal no terrible silence, nor chime the laughter that
    echoes aloud.

Wonder and worship and gladness and tenderest grief are for you who
    dream
Out of the earth like a lost blue cloud from the azure spheres of
    sleep,
Where our bodiless souls are the clustering stars that whirl and
    revolve and leap
    Round the orb of a nameless light in an endless stream.
Oh beauty! the colour of vision is yours and you spring from the
    seeds of dream.

And heaven I know is expressed in you because you were loved of a
    God,
You are nourished by tears of celestial dew because from his hand
    flew death,
And your quivering singing loveliness was born of his quivering
    breath
    That sighed its twilight of sorrows into the sod:
For the heart of the lover you wreathed of old was the heart of
    the Singing God.

Distantly out of the Era of Gold that dims the glass of to-day
You shine in the shape of the beautiful boy the Great Ones adored
    and destroyed:
The wind in a passion of longing arose from his jealous unsatisfied
    void
    And the sun came down in a passion of worship to play--
And the soul of the form their passions made dust is the flower of
    the world to-day.

Oh measureless beauty conceived of the sorrow and love of the Lord
    of Light!
Oh swift brief beauty that died before your Spring accomplished its
    prime!
Divinest death for you, the divinely-beloved, was it less than
    sublime?--
    Oh, rather than die by my enemy's hand in the night,
I would die by the hand of my lover-God at play in a splendour of
    light!