Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Miscellaneous Poems. IV. Juliet after the MasqueradeLætitia Elizabeth Maclean (18021838)
S
She has flung down cap and plume,
Her eye wears softer light,
And her cheek a tenderer bloom:
Falls o’er her marble brow,
From its midnight bonds of pearl,
Free as her thoughts are now.—
O’er those gentle thoughts to brood,
That haunt a girl’s first hour
Of love-touched solitude.
Comes floating on the air,
From the banquet-room it tells
The dancers still are there:
Has left the festal scene,
To dream on what may be,
To muse o’er what has been,
Her ear had drunk that night,
While her heart beat echo-like,
And her cheek burnt ruby bright.
Beneath that moonlit sky,
With her lip of living rose,
Her blue and drooping eye!
Rises on heart and brain;
Not a word, and not a look,
But she lives them o’er again.
Tho’ ne’er did morning close,
With its cold and waking light,
Dreams fair and false as those:
At day-break to the sky,
There, touched by all bright hues,
On its breast awhile they lie;
The rose-tint disappears,
And the falling cloud returns
To its native earth in tears.—
Tho’ away it will be driven,
’Tis something to have past
A single hour in heaven.
Tho’ thy cheek has April bloom
There is that upon them both
Which marks an early tomb.
And can those words be true?
Ah! better far ‘to die,’
Than live as some must do;
Though every nerve be strained,
Whether won to be betrayed,
Or discovered and disdained:—
And yet itself breathe on,
Like the blighted flower which lives,
Tho’ scent and bloom be gone.
Green on the fading tree,
The while we see it wither,
Is maiden not for thee.
And one of passionate grief—
A morning and a midnight—
Fill up thy life’s short leaf!
Of death’s bitterness is past,
Thy last sigh breathed upon the heart,
Beating thine unto the last!