Robert Crawford

Here within the half-light 'tween the night and day
Upon the sands I lie, with thoughts that idly stirr'd
...

I have been touched with her, and have ta'en (Unclear
The acquaintance of her beauty like a dream,
Or as it were a flower of Faerie breathed
...

Music, with the tears in it,
Through my soul is ringing,
Moods like bodies flame and flit
Through the spirit's singing;
...

At the back of the brain a picture lies
Of all we have been and done,
And ever and then a color flames
In the shadow of thought's sun.
...

Behold her on the silent sea,
Yon vessel like a spirit there!
Moved in a dream's reality,
As if she trod the air.
...

She had an other-worldly air,
So like a flower she grew,
As if her thoughts and feelings were
The only life she knew.
...

Evil itself may be but good disguised,
As many a virtue now was once a vice,
Or held to be such by the moralists;
...

This fair woman who is dead
(Sung so sweet of long ago)
Lies not in a mortal bed —
Song has made her couch to grow
...

The fruit of love's desire is sweet
For any man and maid to eat.
However ripened in time's air,
No other can with it compare.
...

Her beauty is the bourne thought cannot pass;
And the angel of the heart's intelligence,
Young Love, might deem that boundary infinite,
...

We whom to-night Love keeps awake
For his own joy, may one day break
Our fast in some Lethéan cave,
When we but a faint memory have,
...

I might not have it then — I might not, yet
She was so near to me, could I forget
She might be nearer? There was in her eyes —
...

I in the autumn of my days
Stand by a place of tears,
And hear the unborn children weep
Within the unborn years;
...

As the crinoid star-fish to the sea-base
By his stem fixed draws bare subsistence in
His straitened sphere, as in the sunless ooze
...

Time grows upon us until we exhaust
Hope's possibilities, and then we die
Who thus of life each make a holocaust
...

I have the man's-heart in me, and 'tis noble
To be alive, to think, to feel, to have
My part in all the precious come-and-go
...

The sky grows white with the moon,
And the sea yearns up to the night
As the soul to an unknown height,
Drawn thence by a starry rune.
...

Within time's stress, amid the facts of life,
Not in monastic solitudes, we find
A way to that is higher than ourselves.
...

Life is up and takes the morning;
Why should love still lie abed?
Lo! the charms of slumber scorning,
Tramps the troop that must be led.
...

The sun is set, and all the stars are come,
Stars I shall no more see; the air is still,
And my life waits the ruin so near now.
...