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.