Songs of Love and War

Look down, fair moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen, purple;
On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon.

The grieving mother stood on the square
 [ ... ]

The flow'rs appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

I will rise now, 
and go about the city in the streets,
and in the broad ways
I will seek him whom my soul loveth;
I sought him, but I found him not.

The watchmen that go about the city found me:
to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?

It was but a little that I passed from them,
but I found him, whom my soul loveth;
I held him, and would not let him go,
until I had brought him into my mother's house,
and into the chamber of her that conceived me.

I charge you, o ye daughters of Jerusalem,
by the roes, and by the hinds of the field,
that ye stir not up, not awake my love,
till he please.

My beloved is mine, and I am his:
he feedeth among the lilies.

My Triumph lasted till the Drums
Had left the Dead alone
And then I dropped my Victory
And chastened stole along
To where the finished Faces
Conclusion turned on me
And then I hated Glory
And wished myself were They.

What is to be is best descried
When it has also been --
Could Prospect taste of Retrospect
The tyrannies of Men
Were Tenderer -- diviner
The Transitive toward.
A Bayonet's contrition
Is nothing to the Dead.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage,/
   must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, /
   incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world:
...For my enemy is dead -- a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin -- I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.