Song
1812-1889
NAY but you, who do not love her,
Is she not pure gold, my mistress?
Holds earth aught--speak truth--above her?
Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,
And this last fairest tress of all,
So fair, see, ere I let it fall?
Because, you spend your lives in praising;
To praise, you search the wide world over:
Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
If earth holds aught--speak truth--above her?
Above this tress, and this, I touch
But cannot praise, I love so much!
THERE 's a woman like a dewdrop, she 's so purer than the purest;
And her noble heart 's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the
surest:
And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of lustre
Hid i' the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wild-grape
cluster,
Gush in golden-tinted plenty down her neck's rose-misted marble:
Then her voice's music ... call it the well's bubbling, the bird's
warble!
And this woman says, 'My days were sunless and my nights were
moonless,
Parch'd the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's outbreak
tuneless,
If you loved me not!' And I who (ah, for words of flame!) adore her,
Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably before her--
I may enter at her portal soon, as now her lattice takes me,
And by noontide as by midnight make her mine, as hers she makes me!
DayPoems Poem No. 671
<a href="http://www.daypoems.net/poems/671.html">Song by Robert Browning</a>
The DayPoems Poetry Collection, www.daypoems.net
Timothy Bovee, editor
Poets Poems