Where sunless rivers weep
Their waves into the deep
She sleeps a charmed sleep:
Awake her not.
...
The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill:
I had walk’d on at the wind’s will,—
I sat now, for the wind was still.
...
Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
That wavers with the spirit's wind:
...
Under the arch of Life, where love and death,
Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw
Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe,
I drew it in as simply as my breath.
...
Master of the murmuring courts
Where the shapes of sleep convene!--
Lo! my spirit here exhorts
All the powers of thy demesne
...
AT length the then of my long hope was now;
Yet had my spirit an extreme unrest:
I knew the good from better was grown best
...
Not in thy body is thy life at all
But in this lady's lips and hands and eyes;
Through these she yields thee life that vivifies
What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall.
...
As when two men have loved a woman well,
Each hating each, through Love's and Death's deceit;
Since not for either this stark marriage-sheet
And the long pauses of this wedding bell;
...
Beauty like hers is genius. Not the call
Of Homer's or of Dante's heart sublime, --
Not Michael's hand furrowing the zones of time, --
Is more with compassed mysteries musical;
...