eternal lids apart

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art --

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors --

No -- yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever -- or else swoon to death.

(weheartit)

paolo and francesca

As Hermes once took to his feathers light,

When lulled Argus, baffled, swooned and slept,

So on a Delphic reed, my idle sprite

So played, so charmed, so conquered, so bereft,

The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;

And seeing it asleep, so fled away,

Not to pure Ida, with its snow-cold skies,

Nor unto Tempe, where Jove grieved a day;

But to that second circle of sad Hell,

Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw

Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell

Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,

Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form

I floated with, about that melancholy storm

(fgr)