Guy Wetmore Carryl

“ Merciful night, in spite of all, shall find
Us waiting each for each, for sleep is kind,
⁠And moulds from sorrow’s clay the cup of peace.
⁠Heart of my heart, drink deep of that surcease
That at her goblet’s rim divinely gleams:
⁠Whate’er may be deceptive day’s caprice,
I wait you on the borderland of dreams,
⁠Where the world stumbles and is left behind!
LVII
And, through my visions as you thread your way,
⁠Girt with that grace my eyes alone may see,
If I make bold your noiseless steps to stay,
It is because in sleep alone I may
⁠Be half to you of all that I would be. ”

“ I love you for your lips the rose hath kissed—
⁠Your cheeks, more tender than arbutus blooms;
For those half-hidden veins of amethyst
In your white throat, and for the tender mist
⁠That clouds your eyes, as haze the autumn glooms:
⁠For that faint subtle fragrance which perfumes
The soft bewitching tangle of your hair;
⁠For your low laughter in the darkening rooms,
Where our instinctive hands lie linked, and where
⁠Daylight and dark keep transitory tryst! ”

“ Spread through a lifetime, shed the steady light
⁠Of calm content on twice ten thousand days.
⁠Ah, if the jealous future would but raise
These, like white beacons on a sad sea thrown,
⁠How patient we should be of life’s delays
That seem denials! Ah, love, had I but known
⁠All my life long the will of Fate to-night!
XV
Close was your secret guarded, empty years!
⁠No far horizon ever hid so well
The dreamt-of harbors of imagined spheres
From the strained eyes of ocean’s pioneers,
⁠Until the appointed dawn from swell to swell
⁠Leaped, and decreed discovery befel. ”

“ Yet, like some chapter of an old romance,
⁠My heart holds one memorial morning dear,
When the gray hazes whirled, as in a dance,
Up from the rippled Channel’s wide expanse,
⁠And sunlit shores stept, on a sudden, near. ”

“ The blooms of mere enchantment, beauty-blown,
Lie withered, and the full fruit, slowlier grown,
⁠Bends the slim bough beneath unmeasured gold.
⁠The sun, of these new secrets, Time hath told—
The tempests of communicative tears—
⁠The strong, blind winds of passion—and behold!—
The careful cultivation of the years
⁠Hath made a harvest of what Love hath sown.
LXXI
I love you now, because that I and you
⁠Were complements before the birth of Time;
Because our souls have come, the ages through,
Down to the moment when God’s purpose drew
⁠The twain together in one perfect rhyme ”

“ Than earth hath seen, that follows where you go;
⁠And all the solemn silence is atune
With unvoiced songs, such as the angels know,
⁠Born without breath upon the breathless air!
LV
We may not hope to find each other thus
⁠In waking hours. Our days are too beset
With the world’s voices, shrill and clamorous:
Life is too sharply strained, too strenuous—
⁠We are but mortal, and we may forget! ”

“ When I should see that gate wide-open flung
⁠That of Love’s garden screened the sunlit ways;
⁠Long have I waited, till your hand should raise
The veil between our understanding eyes,
⁠That you in mine, that I in yours might gaze,
While my heart shouted to the open skies
⁠The song that long in silence it hath sung!
VII
Dear eyes of earnest brown! How well I know
⁠Their every sadness and their every smile ”

“ And hill-girt landscapes, haloed with a light
⁠Ethereal, that none hath ever named.
⁠No ownership in these I could have claimed:
They are not of my making. Love alone
⁠Could so blind Nature, utterly ashamed,
With beauty thus out-rivalling her own,
⁠That seems transcendent to our mortal sight. ”

“ Nearly all of this verse is in the major key. Even its brooding sentiment is that of a live man and no weakling.
Byron was a live man, and, to the end, a young man, never more so than when he thought himself otherwise. If it were just to apply a single epithet to the titular poem of this volume, it might be termed Byronic; for it is full of the Haroldian spirit of youth,—never more so than when its writer, at that stage where a man feels older than he ever again will feel until reaching his grand climacteric, breaks forth with “Heart of my heart, I am no longer young!” ”

“ Holier than we have dreamt of or have planned;
⁠Some fairer fate eternally is ours:—
Only it is so hard to understand.
⁠You love me! Are there greater things than this?
LX
I think that in the past, unheard, unseen,
⁠All influences of the earth and air,
The gleam of water, and the forest’s green,
Have spun some cobweb sympathy between
⁠Our hearts, now one in finding them so fair:
⁠That every sunset taught us to prepare
For the pure dawn when Love was sure to rise ”

“ As, when their own long, languid evenings fall,
⁠The sea calls landward from her curving bay.
⁠Hearing, I answered, bent my aimless way
To the cool shade that nestled ’neath their palms,
⁠And so, long nights on sloping shoreways lay,
While moons crept, silver-shod, across the calms,
⁠And wrapped their radiance in the horizon’s pall. ”

“ The White Republic
OF Pilgrim eyes previsioned and Puritan lips foretold,
Dowered with wealth of woodland and glory of virgin gold,
Awoke the White Republic, the gift of the Lord Most High,
As broad and free as the borders be of her own wide western sky!
Mother of loyal daughters, whose girdle and guard are these—
Their leagues of inland waters and bulwarks of splendid seas,
Each to the other plighted till the end of time they stand,
Palmetto to pine united and prairie to pasture-land. ”

“ Upon my sight, within her eyes such thirst
⁠As dares and damns, a rose her lips between.
⁠Girdled with jewels, crowned as is a queen,
With Lethe’s poppies dozing in her hair,
⁠Gowned in thin stuffs of silver-dotted sheen,
Humanly sinful, and divinely fair,
⁠She tore the mask from off my best and worst! ”

“ It could scarcely have been otherwise, with his unique facility and irrepressible zest in life.
Life must have seemed very fair to him, as he himself seemed to others, when I first knew him in his student days. He did everything with a happy ease, and was apparently without a care. Handsome, healthy, debonair,—a youth in years and bearing, a man in his accomplishments,—he surely was Fortune’s favorite. ”

“ Readers who care for poetry will at once observe that a certain lyrical eloquence is a general characteristic of The Garden of Years and the ensuing shorter pieces, charged with a passion for Nature and a spirit of intense sympathy with their author’s fellow-men. ”