Poems and Baudelaire Flowers/Love’s Lightning

by John Collings Squire

LOVE’S LIGHTNING

Last night as I lay awake in bed
A flash of you came into my head
And into my heart, and straightway fled.

It passed from the chamber suddenly,
Leaving no trace to know it by
But a tightened breast and a wet, glad eye.

Like a moonray soft it came and went,
Which glimmers through where the cloud-wrack’s rent,
Hovers a moment and then is spent;

Or a bee against a window-pane,
Which taps but once and never again,
Some autumn day, before the rain.

For one brief moment I felt it stealing
Along the verge of thought and feeling
As though some great vague thing revealing,

As though for that moment sad and sweet
My soul was out in the infinite.
And Life and Death were as one to it.