Poems (Tree)/Oh: Why Will You Not Let Me Love You
OH! why will you not let me love you
Well enough?
You have plucked my blossoms,
Gathered the leaves
And revived them with water;
But all the tortuous roots
Delving for your spirit
In subterranean passions
With a blind unresting desire,
Have you felt them, have you known?
In the blackest night of sleep
Though I be sunk a thousand fathoms
In the cerulean depths of slow oblivion,
My soul still swims toward you
Against the envious pressure of the tide. . . .
You who are so tired, so filled with sleep
That you would brush a rose-leaf from your cheek
Lest its heaviness should stir your rest,
How can you shoulder the weight of my great burden
That is too vast for me to bear alone?
I tell you
Love is no little thing,
No moth-winged Cupid painted on the air,
No thin flute music petaling the silence
As leaves that flutter from a cherry tree.
It is the thought that broods upon its death,
The dread of mountains looking to the storm
Ere shrieks of lightning cleave their breasts in twain.
It is the fire that pillars up the stars
To mix its flame with their eternal gold.
Oh, listen to me!
You shall hear my message sung from sphere to sphere
As star-dust pouring a path through Heaven.
You shall know me
In the pensive shadows of trees,
In the luminary phantoms
Reflected in the stillness of a lake;
In the arrows of sunlight shot through meshing leaves
And quivering in the moss;
In the abandoned play of breakers
Showering their crystals to the moon;
In the folly of rainbow dolphins.
I only ask of you
To be the diver in my deepest pool,
To bring from out its blue obscurity
The things my life has moulded unaware,
Treasures my passion and my hunger fashioned
In loneliness of prayer unlit by life,
Created out of nothing save myself
Within the blind fast silence of the soul.
Well enough?
You have plucked my blossoms,
Gathered the leaves
And revived them with water;
But all the tortuous roots
Delving for your spirit
In subterranean passions
With a blind unresting desire,
Have you felt them, have you known?
In the blackest night of sleep
Though I be sunk a thousand fathoms
In the cerulean depths of slow oblivion,
My soul still swims toward you
Against the envious pressure of the tide. . . .
You who are so tired, so filled with sleep
That you would brush a rose-leaf from your cheek
Lest its heaviness should stir your rest,
How can you shoulder the weight of my great burden
That is too vast for me to bear alone?
I tell you
Love is no little thing,
No moth-winged Cupid painted on the air,
No thin flute music petaling the silence
As leaves that flutter from a cherry tree.
It is the thought that broods upon its death,
The dread of mountains looking to the storm
Ere shrieks of lightning cleave their breasts in twain.
It is the fire that pillars up the stars
To mix its flame with their eternal gold.
Oh, listen to me!
You shall hear my message sung from sphere to sphere
As star-dust pouring a path through Heaven.
You shall know me
In the pensive shadows of trees,
In the luminary phantoms
Reflected in the stillness of a lake;
In the arrows of sunlight shot through meshing leaves
And quivering in the moss;
In the abandoned play of breakers
Showering their crystals to the moon;
In the folly of rainbow dolphins.
I only ask of you
To be the diver in my deepest pool,
To bring from out its blue obscurity
The things my life has moulded unaware,
Treasures my passion and my hunger fashioned
In loneliness of prayer unlit by life,
Created out of nothing save myself
Within the blind fast silence of the soul.
1918