Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor, Most gracious singer of high poems! where The dancers will break footing, from the care Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more. What hast thou to do With looking from the lattice-lights at me, A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree? The chrism is on thine head,-on mine, the dew,- And Death must dig the level where these agree. Thou, bethink thee, art A guest for queens to social pageantries, With gages from a hundred brighter eyes Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part Of chief musician. Our ministering two angels look surprise On one another, as they strike athwart Their wings in passing.

Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart! Unlike our uses and our destinies. “Nay” is worse From God than from all others, O my friend! Men could not part us with their worldly jars, Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars: And, heaven being rolled between us at the end, We should but vow the faster for the stars. and laid the curse So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce My sight from seeing thee,-that if I had died, The deathweights, placed there, would have signified Less absolute exclusion. But only three in all God’s universe Have heard this word thou hast said,-Himself, beside Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied One of us. But, there, The silver answer rang,-“Not Death, but Love.” II.

Straightway I was ’ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,- “Guess now who holds thee?”-“Death,” I said. I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young: And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me.

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning