Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
VII. Loves PowerThe Loveliness of Love
George Darley (17951846)I
A crystal brow, the moon’s despair,
Nor the snow’s daughter, a white hand,
Nor mermaid’s yellow pride of hair:
Your lips that seem on roses fed,
Your breasts, where Cupid tumbling lies
Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed,—
Like Hebe’s in her ruddiest hours,
A breath that softer music speaks
Than summer winds a-wooing flowers;—
Coral beneath the ocean-stream,
Whose brink when your adventurer slips
Full oft he perisheth on them.
That wave hot youth to fields of blood?
Did Helen’s breast, though ne’er so soft,
Do Greece or Ilium any good?
Poison can breath, that erst perfumed;
There ’s many a white hand holds an urn
With lovers’ hearts to dust consumed.
They are but empty cells for pride;
He who the Siren’s hair would win
Is mostly strangled in the tide.
A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I would trust,
Yet never linked with error find,—
Could pour my secret heart of woes,
Like the care-burdened honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose,—
So indefeasible might be
That, when my spirit wonned above,
Hers could not stay, for sympathy.