A PIPPO Pipistrello

Its rosy shade is bountifulOf silence, and assuages thought.O lay your lips against your handAnd let me feel your breath through it,While through the sense your song shall fitThe soul to understand.The music lives upon my brainBetween your hands within mine eyes;It stirs your lifted throat like pain,An aching pulse of melodies.Lean nearer, let the…

For heavy hearts to hear.So it is, my dear.Very like indeed:Sea and sky, afar, on high,Sand and strewn seaweed,—Very like indeed.But the sea stands spreads one wall with the flat skies,Where the lean black craft like fliesSeem well-nigh stagnated,Soon to drop off dead.Seemed it so to usWhen I was thine and thou wast mine,And all…

To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,Of its own arduous fulness reverent:Carve it in ivory or in ebony,As Day or Night may rule; and let Time seeIts flowering crest impearl’d and orient.A Sonnet is a coin: its face revealsThe soul,–its converse, to what Power ’tis due: —Whether…

Even now, as for our love-world’s new sunrise,Shed very dawn; whose voice, attuned aboveAll modulation of the deep-bowered dove,Is like a hand laid softly on the soul;Whose hand is like a sweet voice to controlThose worn tired brows it hath the keeping of:—What word can answer to thy word,—what gazeTo thine, which now absorbs within…

O wandering water ever whispering?Surely thy speech shall be of her.Thou water, O thou whispering wanderer,What message dost thou bring?Say, hath not Love leaned lowThis hour beside thy far well-head,And there through jealous hollowed fingers saidThe thing that most I long to know–Murmuring with curls all dabbled in thy flowAnd washed lips rosy red?He told…

And the life in her pulses seemed to halt.About her temples for an iron crownShe set stern patience. She did never frown,But her long gaze was gentle to a fault;And, looking deep into her eyes, you had call’dTheir lustre nothing but a mild clear brown.She lives and moves and is a mystery.That which she hath…