Ella Wheeler Wilcox Poems

We will lay our summer away, my friend,
So tenderly lay it away.
It was bright and sweet to the very end,
Like one long, golden day.
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Too sweet and too subtle for pen or for tongue
In phrases unwritten and measures unsung,
As deep and as strange as the sounds of the sea,
Is the song that my spirit is singing to me.
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You left me with the autumn time;
When the winter stripped the forest bare,
Then dressed it in his spotless rime;
When frosts were lurking in the air
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I see the tall church steeples,
They reach so far, so far,
But the eyes of my heart see the world’s great mart,
Where the starving people are.
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In the dawn of the day when the sea and the earth
Reflected the sunrise above,
I set forth with a heart full of courage and mirth
To seek for the Kingdom of Love.
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If all the ships I have at sea
Should come a-sailing home to me,
From sunny lands, and lands of cold,
Ah well! the harbor could not hold
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I think that the bitterest sorrow or pain
Of love unrequited, or cold death’s woe,
Is sweet, compared to that hour when we know
That some grand passion is on the wane.
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Bohemia, o'er thy unatlassed borders
How many cross, with half-reluctant feet,
And unformed fears of dangers and disorders,
To find delights, more wholesome and more sweet
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BOOK FIRST.

I.
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Nay, seer, I do not doubt thy mystic lore,
Nor question that the tenor of my life,
Past, present and the future, is revealed
There in my horoscope. I do believe
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