For all the silver morning is a-glimmer
   With gleaming spears of great Apollo’s host,
And the night fadeth like a spent out swimmer
   Hurled from the headlands of some shining coast. 
O, happy soul, thy mouth at last is singing,
   Drunken with wine of morning’s azure deep,
Sing on, my soul, the world beneath thee swinging,
   A bough of song above a sea of sleep.

2
Who is the lady I sing? 
   Ah, how can I tell thee her praise
For whom all my life’s but the string
   Of a rosary painful of days;

Which I count with a curious smile
   As a miser who hoardeth his gain,
Though, a madhearted spendthrift the while,
   I but gather to waste again.

Yea, I pluck from the tree of the years,
   As a country maid greedy of flowers,
Each day brimming over with tears,
   And I scatter like petals its hours;

And I trample them under my feet
   In a frenzy of cloven-hoofed swine,
And the breath of their dying is sweet,
   And the blood of their hearts is as wine.

O, I throw me low down on the ground
   And I bury my face in their death,
And only I rise at the sound
   Of a wind as it scattereth,

As it scattereth sweetly the dried
   Leaves withered and brittle and sere
Of days of old years that have died—­
   And, O, it is sweet in my ear

And I rise me and build me a pyre
   Of the whispering skeleton things,
And my heart laugheth low with the fire,
   Laugheth high with the flame as it springs;

And above in the flickering glare
   I mark me the boughs of my tree,
My tree of the years, growing bare. 
   Growing bare with the scant days to be.

Then I turn to my beads and I pray
   For the axe at the root of the tree—­
Last flower, last bead—­ah! last day
   That shall part me, my darling, from thee!

And I pray for the knife on the string
   Of this rosary painful of days: 
But who is the Lady I sing? 
   Ah, how can I tell thee her praise!

II

I make this rhyme of my lady and me
To give me ease of my misery,
Of my lady and me I make this rhyme
For lovers in the after-time. 
And I weave its warp from day to day
In a golden loom deep hid away
In my secret heart, where no one goes
But my lady’s self, and—­no one knows.

With bended head all day I pore
On a joyless task, and yet before
My eyes all day, through each weary hour,
Breathes my lady’s face like a dewy flower. 
Like rain it comes through the dusty air,
Like sun on the meadows to think of her;
O sweet as violets in early spring
The flower-girls to the city bring,
O, healing-bright to wintry eyes
As primrose-gold ’neath northern skies—­
But O for fit thing to compare
With the joy I have in the thought of her! 
So all day long doth her holy face
Bring fragrance to the barren place,
And whensoe’er it comes nearest me,
My loom it weaveth busily.