HAST never come to thee an hour,

mine:Yet if blood like mine circle not in your veins;If you be not silently selected by lovers, and do not silently selectlovers,Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine?

Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing.To think that the sun rose in the east! that men and women wereflexible, real, alive! that everything…

Not the air, delicious and dry, the air of the ripe summer, bearslightly along white down-balls of myriads of seeds,Wafted, sailing gracefully, to drop where they may;Not these–O none of these, more than the flames of me, consuming,burning for his love whom I love!O none, more than I, hurrying in and out:–Does the tide hurry,…

Our life is closed–our life begins;The long, long anchorage we leave,The ship is clear at last–she leaps!She swiftly courses from the shore;Joy! shipmate–joy!

I now suspect that is not all;I now suspect there is something fierce in you, eligible to burstforth;For an athlete is enamour’d of me–and I of him;But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me, eligibleto burst forth,I dare not tell it in words–not even in these songs.

I stand;As the faces, the masks appear–as I glance at the faces, studyingthe masks;(As I glance upward out of this page, studying you, dear friend,whoever you are;)How solemn the thought of my whispering soul, to each in the ranks,and to you;I see behind each mask, that wonder, a kindred soul;O the bullet could never kill…