Never love with all your heart, it only ends in aching; And bit by bit to the smallest part That organ will be breaking.
Never love with all your mind, it only ends in fretting; In musing on sweet joys behind, Too poignant for forgetting.
Never love with all your soul, For such there is no ending, Though a mind that frets may find control, And a shattered heart find mending.
Give but a grain of the heart’s rich seed, confine some under cover, And when love goes, bid him God-speed.
I said:
Now will the poet sing,-
Their cries go thundering
Like blood and tears
Into the nation’s ears,
Like lightning dart
Into the nation’s heart.
Against disease and death and all things fell,
And war,
Their strophes rise and swell
To jar
The foe smug in his citadel.
Remembering their sharp and pretty
Tunes for Sacco and Vanzetti,
I said:
Here too’s a cause divinely spun
For those whose eye are on the sun,
Here in epitome
Is all disgrace
And epic wrong,
Like wine to brace
The minstrel heart, and blare it to song.
Surely, I said,
Now will the poets sing.
But they
“As surely as I hold your hand in mine,
as surely as your crinkled hair belies
the enamored sun pretending that he dies
while still he loiters in its glossy shine,
as surely as I break the slender line
that spider linked us with, in no least wise
am I uncertain that these alien skies
do not our whole life measure and confine.
No less, once in a land of scarlet suns
And brooding winds, before the hurricane
Bore down upon us, long before this pain,
We found a place where quiet water runs;
I held your hand this way upon a hill,
And felt my heart forbear, my pulse grow still”
C
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