L’Envoi(No alteration since 1843 except in numbering the stanzas.)1You shake your head. A random stringYour finer female sense offends.Well—were it not a pleasant thingTo fall asleep with all one’s friends;To pass with all our social tiesTo silence from the paths of men;And every hundred years to riseAnd learn the world, and sleep again;To sleep thro’ terms of mighty wars,And wake on science grown to more,On secrets of the brain, the stars,As wild as aught of fairy lore;And all that else the years will show,The Poet-forms of stronger hours,The vast Republics that may grow,The Federations and the Powers;Titanic forces taking birthIn divers seasons, divers climes;For we are Ancients of the earth,And in the morning of the times.2So sleeping, so aroused from sleepThro’ sunny decads new and strange,Or gay quinquenniads would we reapThe flower and quintessence of change.3Ah, yet would I—and would I might!So much your eyes my fancy take—Be still the first to leap to lightThat I might kiss those eyes awake!For, am I right or am I wrong,To choose your own you did not care;You’d havemymoral from the song,And I will take my pleasure there:And, am I right or am I wrong,My fancy, ranging thro’ and thro’,To search a meaning for the song,Perforce will still revert to you;Nor finds a closer truth than thisAll-graceful head, so richly curl’d,And evermore a costly kissThe prelude to some brighter world.4For since the time when Adam firstEmbraced his Eve in happy hour,And every bird of Eden burstIn carol, every bud to flower,What eyes, like thine, have waken’d hopes?What lips, like thine, so sweetly join’d?Where on the double rosebud droopsThe fullness of the pensive mind;Which all too dearly self-involved,[1]Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;A sleep by kisses undissolved,That lets thee[2]neither hear nor see:But break it. In the name of wife,And in the rights that name may give,Are clasp’d the moral of thy life,And that for which I care to live.[1]1842. The pensive mind that, self-involved.[2]1842. Which lets thee.
(No alteration since 1843 except in numbering the stanzas.)
1
You shake your head. A random stringYour finer female sense offends.Well—were it not a pleasant thingTo fall asleep with all one’s friends;To pass with all our social tiesTo silence from the paths of men;And every hundred years to riseAnd learn the world, and sleep again;To sleep thro’ terms of mighty wars,And wake on science grown to more,On secrets of the brain, the stars,As wild as aught of fairy lore;And all that else the years will show,The Poet-forms of stronger hours,The vast Republics that may grow,The Federations and the Powers;Titanic forces taking birthIn divers seasons, divers climes;For we are Ancients of the earth,And in the morning of the times.
2
So sleeping, so aroused from sleepThro’ sunny decads new and strange,Or gay quinquenniads would we reapThe flower and quintessence of change.
3
Ah, yet would I—and would I might!So much your eyes my fancy take—Be still the first to leap to lightThat I might kiss those eyes awake!For, am I right or am I wrong,To choose your own you did not care;You’d havemymoral from the song,And I will take my pleasure there:And, am I right or am I wrong,My fancy, ranging thro’ and thro’,To search a meaning for the song,Perforce will still revert to you;Nor finds a closer truth than thisAll-graceful head, so richly curl’d,And evermore a costly kissThe prelude to some brighter world.
4
For since the time when Adam firstEmbraced his Eve in happy hour,And every bird of Eden burstIn carol, every bud to flower,What eyes, like thine, have waken’d hopes?What lips, like thine, so sweetly join’d?Where on the double rosebud droopsThe fullness of the pensive mind;Which all too dearly self-involved,[1]Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;A sleep by kisses undissolved,That lets thee[2]neither hear nor see:But break it. In the name of wife,And in the rights that name may give,Are clasp’d the moral of thy life,And that for which I care to live.
[1]1842. The pensive mind that, self-involved.
[2]1842. Which lets thee.