The Need To Love

The need to love that all the stars

Entered my heart and banished all beside.

Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;

Faded the flowers that one time satisfied.

Before the beauty of the west on fire,

The moonlit hills from cloister-casements

Cloud-like arose the image of desire,

And cast out peace and maddened solitude.

I sought the City and the hopes it held:

With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled,

As the thick roofs and walls

Shut out the fair horizons of the world—-A truant from the fields and rustic joy,

In my changed thought that image even

Shut out the gods I worshipped as a

And all the pure delights I used to know.

Often the veil has trembled at some

Of lovely reminiscence and

How much of beauty Nature holds

Sweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield:

Clouds, window-framed, beyond the huddled

When summer cumulates their golden chains,

Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves,

Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes,

An organ-grinder's melancholy

In rainy streets, or from an attic

The blue skies of a windy

Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill:

And my soul once more would be wrapped

In the pure peace and blessing of those years.

Before the fierce infection of

Had ravaged all the flesh.

Through starting

Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did,

Again ere long the prison-shades would

That Youth condemns itself to walk amid,

So narrow, but so beautiful withal.

And I have followed Fame with less devotion,

And kept no real ambition but to

Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit

My dream of palpable divinity;

And aught the world contends for to mine

Seemed not so real a meaning of

As only once to clasp before I

My vision of embodied happiness.