And I have walked with love that way,
  And on that golden crest
The sun was happy for my love,
  For she is golden-tressed. 
Red gold, that of all golden things
  The great sun marks for best.

O golden castle of the sky
  Hereafter gold can be
Only your image when the sun
  Transfigured her for me,
Till she was golden-clouded Jove,
  And I her Danae.

Hereafter in the chambered night
  When linked love is told,
One thought shall spare to climb that hill
  Into the sunbright fold,
For a great summer noon when love
  Was gold, and gold, and gold.

BURNING BUSH

From babyhood I have known the beauty of earth—­
I learnt it, I think, in the strange months before birth,
I learnt it passing and passing by each moon
From the harvest month into my natal June. 
My mother, the dear, the lovely I hardly knew,
Bearing me must have walked and wandered through
Stubble of silver or gold, as moon or sun
Lit earth in the days when my body was begun. 
And then October with leaves splendid and blown
She watched with my little body a little grown,
And winter fell, and into our being passed
Firm frost and icy rivers and the blast
Of winds that on the iron clods of plough
Beat with an unseen charging.  Then the bough
Of spring came green, and her glad body stirred
With a son’s wombed leaping, and she heard
Songs of the air and woods and waterways,
And with them singing the coming of my days. 
And nesting time drew on to summer flowers,
And me unborn she taught through patient hours. 
Then on that first June day, with spices blown
Of roses over clover crops unmown,
And grey wind-lifted leaves and blossom of bean,
She gave her dear white beauty to the keen
Anguish of women, and brought my body to birth
Already skilled in the sculptures of the earth.

Then in the days when her breasts nourished me,
Daily she walked, that happy girl, to see
How summer prospered to bring the harvest on,
And how the gardens and how the orchards shone
With scarlet and blue and yellow flowers and fruit,
And hear with equal love the lonely flute
Of legendary satyrs in the wood,
Or the still voice of Christ in bachelorhood. 
And she would come I know to me her son
With lovely secret gossip of journeys done
In fields where some day my own feet should go. 
It was not gossip in words that I could not know,
Mere ease and pleasure for her mother wit,
But such as I could feel the joy of it
Beating about my baby blood and sense,
Maternal tending of intelligence
In the unwhispered rites of bosom and lip,
Divinings worded in bodily fellowship. 
And every shape and colour and scent she knew,
Were intimations winding, folding, through
My infancies of flesh and thought, each one