OF JOAN’S YOUTH

I WOULD unto my fair restore A simple thing: The flushing cheek she had before! Out-velveting No more, no more By Severn shore, The carmine grape, the moth’s auroral wing. Ah, say how winds in flooding grass Unmoor the rose; Or guileful ways the salmon pass To sea, disclose; For so, alas, With Love, alas, With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.

LOST love, be never beyond Love’s calling! For this I claim of you, strong heart, sweet As fontal water in Arden falling, As first-mown hay in the April heat: To tend from heaven, to rear, to harden, And bring to bloom in the outer cold, Our daffodil bud of a walled-in garden, Our son that is like you, and six years old; And lest his worth be the worth unreal, To ward him not from the mortal blast, But suffer your own, through a long ordeal, Verily like you to be at the last, And hear men murmur, if so he merit In your old place with your look to arise: “The sign of a saved soul who can inherit?— You have earned, O King! those beautiful eyes.”