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