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Poetry

A Dagazine of Verse

VOL. VIII
No. II

MAY, 1916

BALDUR

LD loves, old griefs, the burthen of old songs That Time, who changes all things, cannot change:

Eternal themes! Ah, who shall dare to join The sad procession of the kings of songIrrevocable names, that sucked the dregs Of sorrow from the broken honeycomb Of fellowship?-or brush the tears that hang Bright as ungathered dewdrops on a briar? Death hallows all; but who will bear with me To breathe a more heartrending lamentation, To mourn the memory of a love divided

By life, not death, a friend not dead but changed?

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Not dead-but what is death? Because I hoard
Immortal love, that withers not, but keeps
Full virtue like some rare medicament

Hoarded for ages in a crystal jar

By wonder-working gnomes; that only waits
The sound of that lost voice, familiar still,
Or sight of face or touch of hand, to bring
Life, like the dawn whose gentle theft unties
The girdle of the petal-folded flowers,
And ravishes their scent before they wake:
My love is like a fountain frozen o'er,
But no returning sun will ever break
The seal of that forbidden spring; no foot
Invade the weed-grown pathway; never kiss
Wake the enchanted beauty of the wood,
And bid the wheels of time revolve again.
Though one should walk the ways of life, and wear
The sweet remembered name, yet he is not
My playmate; no, the boy whom I have loved
Died long ago; the man is nothing but

His aging sepulchre.

And I, even I,

Know in my deepest heart that I am not
The boy who loved him; and I would I were,
With a most bitter longing which there are
No creeds to comfort. Do we madly feign
The soul to be immortal? Fools!-it is not
Even mortal, does not last the little space
The body does, but alters visibly,

And dies a million times 'twixt breath and breath.

Forever and forever and forever
Outgrown and left behind and cast away
The joy that was the blossom of the soul,
And hours that were the butterflies of time.
What though Elysian fields be white with light,
Crowded with glorious forms, and freed from fear
Or spoil or shock, how shall it profit me

Aged with sad hours, to pass to them and meet
Him as he is, removed and fallen and marred?
Hath any God the power to give me back
My boyhood; to undo this growth of years,
In which I lose the sense of what I was,
And take a different nature? We, self-wrapped,
Conjure with dreams of immortality,

And wit not that the spirit is yet more frail

Than that which holds it. Constant is it in nothing

But change; the transmigration of the soul

Goes on from hour to hour, it does not wait

The dissolution of our frame, but is

The law of life, fulfilled in everywise,

And we who fear destruction perish ever.

The soul-that vaulting speck, that busy flame,
That climbing passion-flower, that god, that atom—
It is the seeding-point of forces fed

By earth and air and all we hear and see
And handle. We take life and give it, but
We may not keep it. Sooner might we hope
To clutch the trickling moments in our palm,

Baldur

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