L’Envoi

You shake your head. A random string
  Your finer female sense offends.
Well – were it not a pleasant thing
  To fall asleep with all one’s friends;
To pass with all our social ties
  To silence from the paths of men;
And every hundred years to rise
  And learn the world and sleep again;
To sleep through years of mighty wars,
  And wake on science grown to more,
On secrets of the brain, the stars,
  As wild as aught on fairy lore;
And all that else the years will show,
  The Poet-forms of stronger hours,
The vast Republics that may grow,
  The Federations and the Powers;
Titanic forces taking birth
  In diverse seasons, diverse climes;
For we are Ancients of the earth,
  And in the morning of the times.

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep
    Thro’ sunny decades new and strange,
Or gay quinquenniads would we reap
    The flower and quintessence of change.

Ah, yet would I—and would I might!
    So much your eyes my fancy take—
Be still the first to leap to light
    That I might kiss those eyes awake!
For, am I right, or am I wrong,
    To choose your own you did not care;
You’d have my moral from the song,
    And I will take my pleasure there:
And, am I right or am I wrong,
    My fancy, ranging thro’ and thro’,
To search a meaning for the song,
    Perforce will still revert to you;
Nor finds a closer truth than this
    All-graceful head, so richly curl’d,
And evermore a costly kiss
    The prelude to some brighter world.

For since the time when Adam first
    Embraced his Eve in happy hour,
And every bird of Eden burst
    In carol, every bud to flower,
What eyes, like thine, have waken’d hopes,
    What lips, like thine, so sweetly join’d?
Where on the double rosebud droops
    The fulness of the pensive mind;
Which all too dearly self-involved,
    Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;
A sleep by kisses undissolved,
    That lets thee neither hear nor see:
But break it. In the name of wife,
    And in the rights that name may give,
Are clasp’d the moral of thy life,
    And that for which I care to live.