graveyard's dream

I dreamt today of passing next the graveyard where she lays,

And hearing chirping from the goldcrests birds, that the barren rays

Of the boughs twinkled with the plumes that puffed the cold with embers,

And with their tails as comets they arrayed the modest bowers

That bowed down their mazy knobs to wed her lasting rest with comfort. 

I followed to the ground still loosened by the shovelling sport

And there I found the grazing wonder of some leavened daffodils 

Whose turgid petals were inflamed by the same sprouting rills 

That girt her hands with thirsty capillaries when to me

She stretched the pulse that love from love had harboured in a blooming sea

That sought no courtesy to satisfy its boundless sway 

Where endlessly bestowing depts, by doting, did her grace repay.

Then, the flowers said: "come ease your brow with our light-woven scent;

We are the love that you have sown when to her your soul was bent

"That will not leave the earth, even if you have no more desire

To soar from where it's couched the air that can't restore her fire.

"Take these seeds, whose lymph embalms the rain that blossomed in your dreams

When from her eyes were stemmed the skies that planted their bright beams

"In you, with leaves of the sublime imagery that reached

Where clouds to girt their dimness with her radiance beseeched,

"And let their uncorrupted wombs protect the hopes that grew

In her, as with the portion of her presence she gave new

"Proportions to your senses, mothering a universe

Where her details the compass lend that shed the withering of verse.

"We incarnate the cravings you mov'd to donate to her

But failed, because appalled by how your feelings were largér

"Than the ensign inspiring them: which was her simple being,

The fullness that was manifested simply in her being,

"That held enthralled the contours of the element she sected

To partake in the quintessence she perfected,

"And stilled the craning of your cumbersome embroidery

In vaults on vaults of th' heaven fancy winged boundary

"She was the cornerstone of, and its crowning jewellery.

What does it matter, then, you don't voice your reverie?

"How could the light that sparkled your competing veneration

Be brightened or obscured by firmaments of your creation?

'We grow beyond the frame that knowledge poises on its losses:

The more ethereal we, th' intenser is the joy that kisses

'As it consumes, - too frail a stem to be among the dross

Of the common world confused, but gemming still its fire does emboss

'The tempered tenderness that tended your two selves together

In severed phases blessed in dance to be re-joined forever

'Thus you will always be with her, and in this solitude

Remember it's carved the litany that was your plentitude

'As from dream to dream you tasted of the fruits that gave her splendour

You can distill from your depriving a wake more and more.'