Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.
The Cap and BellsWilliam Butler Yeats (18651939)
A
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.
When owls began to call:
It had grown wise-tongued by thinking
Of a quiet and light footfall;
She rose in her pale night gown;
She drew in the heavy casement
And push’d the latches down.
When the owls call’d out no more:
In a red and quivering garment
It sang to her through the door.
Of a flutter of flower-like hair;
But she took up her fan from the table
And waved it off on the air.
‘I will send them to her and die’;
And when the morning whiten’d
He left them where she went by.
Under a cloud of her hair,
And her red lips sang them a love song,
Till stars grew out of the air.
And the heart and the soul came through,
To her right hand came the red one,
To her left hand came the blue.
A chattering wise and sweet,
And her hair was a folded flower,
And the quiet of love in her feet.