Love, you saw me gather men and women,
     Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,
     Enter each and all, and use their service,
     Speak from every mouth,—­the speech a poem. 
     Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows,
     Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving: 
     I am mine and yours—­the rest be all men’s,
     Karshish, Cleon, Norbert, and the fifty. 
     Let me speak this once in my true person,
     Not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea,
     Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence: 
     Pray you, look on these, my men and women,
     Take and keep my fifty poems finished;
     Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also! 
     Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.

     Not but that you know me!  Lo, the moon’s self! 
     Here in London, yonder late in Florence,
     Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured. 
     Curving on a sky imbrued with color,
     Drifted over Fiesole by twilight,
     Came she, our new crescent of a hair’s-breadth. 
     Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato,
     Rounder ’twixt the cypresses and rounder,
     Perfect till the nightingales applauded. 
     Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished,
     Hard to greet, she traverses the house-roofs,
     Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver,
     Goes dispiritedly, glad to finish. 
     What, there’s nothing in the moon noteworthy? 
     Nay:  for if that moon could love a mortal,
     Use to charm him (so to fit a fancy),
     All her magic (’tis the old sweet mythos). 
     She would turn a new side to her mortal,
     Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman—­
     Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace,
     Blind to Galileo on his turret,
     Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats—­him, even! 
     Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal—­
     When she turns round, comes again in heaven,
     Opens out anew for worse or better! 
     Proves she like some portent of an iceberg
     Swimming full upon the ship it founders,
     Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals? 
     Proves she as the paved work of a sapphire
     Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain? 
     Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu
     Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest,
     Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire. 
     Like the bodied heaven in his clearness
     Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work,
     When they ate and drank and saw God also!

     What were seen?  None knows, none ever shall know. 
     Only this is sure—­the sight were other,
     Not the moon’s same side, born late in Florence,
     Dying now impoverished here in London. 
     God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
     Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
     One to show a woman when he loves her!