* * *

     This I may know:  her dressing and undressing
     Such a change of light shows as when the skies in sport
     Shift from cloud to moonlight; or edging over thunder
     Slips a ray of sun; or sweeping into port
     White sails furl; or on the ocean borders
     White sails lean along the waves leaping green. 
     Visions of her shower before me, but from eyesight
     Guarded she would be like the sun were she seen.

* * *

     Front door and back of the mossed old farmhouse
     Open with the morn, and in a breezy link
     Freshly sparkles garden to stripe-shadowed orchard,
     Green across a rill where on sand the minnows wink. 
     Busy in the grass the early sun of summer
     Swarms, and the blackbird’s mellow fluting notes
     Call my darling up with round and roguish challenge: 
     Quaintest, richest carol of all the singing throats!

* * *

     Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy
     Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school,
     Cricketing below, rushed brown and red with sunshine;
     O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool! 
     Spying from the farm, herself she fetched a pitcher
     Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak. 
     Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe,
     Said, ‘I will kiss you’:  she laughed and leaned her cheek.

* * *

     Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof
     Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo. 
     Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy road-way
     Sometimes pipes a chaffinch; loose droops the blue. 
     Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river,
     Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly. 
     Nowhere is she seen; and if I see her nowhere,
     Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky.

* * *

     O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasure-armful! 
     O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced! 
     O the treasure-tresses one another over
     Nodding!  O the girdle slack about the waist! 
     Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet
     Quick amid the wheatears:  wound about the waist,
     Gathered, see these brides of earth one blush of ripeness! 
     O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!

* * *

     Large and smoky red the sun’s cold disk drops,
     Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded snow: 
     Eastward large and still lights up a bower of moon-rise,
     Whence at her leisure steps the moon aglow. 
     Nightlong on black print-branches our beech-tree
     Gazes in this whiteness:  nightlong could I.
     Here may life on death or death on life be painted. 
     Let me clasp her soul to know she cannot die!

* * *