Madison Julius Cawein

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.