Love’s Tenderness
Deem not my love is only for the bloom,
The honey and the marble, that is You;
Tis so, Beloved, common loves consume
Their treasury, and vanish like the dew.
Nay, but my love’s a thing that’s far more true;
For little loves a little hour hath room,
But not for us their brief and trivial doom,
In a far richer soil our loving grew,
From deeper wells of being it upsprings;
Nor shall the wildest kiss that makes one mouth,
Draining all nectar from the flowered world,
Slake its divine unfathomable drouth;
And, when your wings against my heart lie furled,
With what a tenderness it dreams and sings!
