241 lines
9.4 KiB
Plaintext
241 lines
9.4 KiB
Plaintext
1890
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PANTHEA
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by Oscar Wilde
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PANTHEA
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Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
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From passionate pain to deadlier delight,-
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I am too young to live without desire,
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Too young art thou to waste this summer night
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Asking those idle questions which of old
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Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.
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For sweet, to feel is better than to know,
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And wisdom is a childless heritage,
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One pulse of passion-youth's first fiery glow,-
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Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:
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Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,
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Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love, and eyes
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to see!
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Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale
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Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
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So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
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That high in heaven she hung so far
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She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune,-
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Mark how she wreathes each horn with mist, yon late
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and laboring moon.
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White lilies, in whose cups the gold bees dream,
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The fallen snow of petals where the breeze
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Scatters the chestnut blossom, or the gleam
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Of all our endless sins, our vain endeavour
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Enough for thee, dost thou desire more?
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Alas! the Gods will give naught else from their
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eternal store.
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For our high Gods have sick and wearied grown
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Of boyish limbs in water,- are not these
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For wasted days of youth to make atone
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By pain or prayer or priest, and never, never,
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Hearken they now to either good or ill,
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But send their rain upon the just and the unjust at will.
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They sit at ease, our Gods they sit at ease,
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Strewing with leaves of rose their scented wine,
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They sleep, they sleep, beneath the rocking trees
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Where asphodel and yellow lotus twine,
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Mourning the old glad days before they knew
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What evil things the heart of man could dream, and
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dreaming do.
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And far beneath the brazen floor, they see
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Like swarming flies the crowd of little men,
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The bustle of small lives, then wearily
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Back to their lotus-haunts they turn again
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Kissing each other's mouths, and mix more deep
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The poppy-seeded draught which brings soft
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purple-lidded sleep.
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There all day long the golden-vestured sun,
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Their torch-bearer, stands with his torch a-blaze,
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And when the gaudy web of noon is spun
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By its twelve maidens through the crimson haze
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Fresh from Endymion's arms comes forth the moon,
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And the immortal Gods in toils of mortal passions swoon.
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There walks Queen Juno through some dewy mead,
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Her grand white feet flecked with the saffron dust
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Of wind-stirred lilies, while young Ganymede
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Leaps in the hot and amber-foaming must,
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His curls all tossed, as when the eagle bare
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The frightened boy from Ida through the blue Ionian air.
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There in the green heart of some garden close
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Queen Venus with the shepherd at her side,
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Her warm soft body like the brier rose
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Which would be white yet blushes at its pride,
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Laughs low for love, till jealous Salmacis
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Peers through the myrtle-leaves and sighs for pain of
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lonely bliss.
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There never does that dreary northwind blow
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Which leaves our English forests bleak and bare,
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Nor ever falls the swift white-feathered snow,
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Nor doth the red-toothed lightning ever dare
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To wake them in the silver-fretted night
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When we lie weeping for some sweet sad sin, some dead
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delight.
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Alas! they know the far Lethaean spring,
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The violet-hidden waters well they know,
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Where one whose feet with tired wandering
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Are faint and broken may take heart and go,
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And from those dark depths cool and crystalline
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Drink, and draw balm, and sleep for sleepless souls,
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and anodyne.
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But we oppress our natures, God or Fate
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Is our enemy, we starve and feed
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On vain repentance- O we are born too late!
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What balm for us in bruised poppy seed
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Who crowd into one finite pulse of time
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The joy of infinite love and the fierce pain of
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infinite crime.
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O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,
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Wearied of pleasures paramour despair,
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Wearied of every temple we have built,
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Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer,
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For man is weak; God sleeps: and heaven is high:
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One fiery-colored moment: one great love: and lo!
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we die.
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Ah! but no ferry-man with laboring pole
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Nears his black shallop to the flowerless strand,
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No little coin of bronze can bring the soul
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Over Death's river to the sunless land,
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Victim and wine and vow are all in vain,
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The tomb is sealed; the soldiers watch; the dead
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rise not again.
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We are resolved into the supreme air,
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We are made one with what we touch and see,
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With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,
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With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree
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Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
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The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all
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is change.
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With beat of systole and of diastole
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One grand great light throbs through earth's giant heart,
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And mighty waves of single Being roll
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From nerve-less germ to man, for we are part
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Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
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One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill.
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From lower cells of waking life we pass
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To full perfection; thus the world grows old:
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We who are godlike now were once a mass
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Of quivering purple flecked with bars of gold,
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Unsentient or of joy or misery,
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And tossed in terrible tangles of some wild and
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wind-swept sea.
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This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn
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Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,
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Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn
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To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
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Will be more fruitful for our love to-night,
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Nothing is lost in nature, all things live in
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Death's despite.
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The boy's first kiss, the hyacinth's first bell,
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The man's last passion, and the last red spear
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That from the lily leaps, the asphodel
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Which will not let its blossoms blow for fear
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Of too much beauty, and the timid shame
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Of the young bridegroom at his lover's eyes,- these
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with the same
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One sacrament are consecrate, the earth
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Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,
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The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth
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At daybreak know a pleasure not less real
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Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood
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We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that
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life is good.
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So when men bury us beneath the yew
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Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,
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And thy soft eyes lush bluebells dimmed with dew,
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And when the white narcissus wantonly
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Kisses the wind its playment, some faint joy
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Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond
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maid and boy.
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And thus without life's conscious torturing pain
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In some sweet flower we will feel the sun,
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And from the linnet's throat will sing again,
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And as two gorgeous-mailed snakes will run
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Over our graves, or as two tigers creep
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Through the hot jungle where the yellow-eyed huge
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lions sleep
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And give them battle! How my heart leaps up
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To think of that grand living after death
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In beast and bird and flower, when this cup,
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Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath,
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And with the pale leaves of some autumn day
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The soul earth's earliest conqueror becomes earth's
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last great prey.
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O think of it! We shall inform ourselves
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Into all sensuous life, the goat-foot Faun,
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The Centaur, or the merry bright-eyed Elves
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That leave their dancing rings to spite the dawn
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Upon the meadows, shall not be more near
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Than you and I to nature's mysteries, for we shall hear
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The thrush's heart beat, and the daisies grow,
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And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun
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On sunless days in winter, we shall know
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By whom the silver gossamer is spun,
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Who paints the diapered fritillaries,
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On what wide wings from shivering pine
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to pine the eagle flies.
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Ay! had we never loved at all, who knows
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If yonder daffodil had lured the bee
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Into its gilded womb, or any rose
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Had hung with crimson lamps its little tree!
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Methinks no leaf would ever bud in spring,
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But for the lovers' lips that kiss, the poet's
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lips that sing.
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Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
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Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair,
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That we are nature's heritors, and one
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With every pulse of life that beats the air?
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Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
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New splendour come unto the flower, new glory
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to the grass.
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And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
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Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
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Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
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Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be
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Part of the mighty universal whole,
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And through all aeons mix and mingle with
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the Kosmic Soul!
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We shall be notes in that great Symphony
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Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
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And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
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One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years
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Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
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The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!
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THE END
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