Vignettes Overseas

Oh give me neither love nor tears,
   Nor dreams that sear the night with fire, 
Go lightly on your pilgrimage
   Unburdened by desire.

Forget me for a month, a year,
   But, oh, beloved, think of me 
When unexpected beauty burns
   Like sudden sunlight on the sea.

Nisida and Prosida are laughing in the light,
Capri is a dewy flower lifting into sight,
Posilipo kneels and looks in the burnished sea,
Naples crowds her million roofs close as close can be;
Round about the mountain's crest a flag of smoke is hung--
Oh when God made Italy he was gay and young!

When beauty grows too great to bear
    How shall I ease me of its ache, 
For beauty more than bitterness
    Makes the heart break.

Now while I watch the dreaming sea
    With isles like flowers against her breast, 
Only one voice in all the world
    Could give me rest.

I asked the heaven of stars
 What I should give my love --
It answered me with silence,
 Silence above.

I asked the darkened sea
 Down where the fishers go --
It answered me with silence,
 Silence below.

Oh, I could give him weeping,
 Or I could give him song --
But how can I give silence
 My whole life long?

On lowlands where the temples lie
    The marsh-grass mingles with the flowers, 
Only the little songs of birds
    Link the unbroken hours.

So in the end, above my heart
    Once like the city wild and gay, 
The slow white stars will pass by night,
    The swift brown birds by day.

Oh for the rising moon
    Over the roofs of Rome, 
And swallows in the dusk
    Circling a darkened dome!

Oh for the measured dawns
    That pass with folded wings-- 
How can I let them go
    With unremembered things?

The bells ring over the Anno,
    Midnight, the long, long chime; 
Here in the quivering darkness
    I am afraid of time.

Oh, gray bells cease your tolling,
    Time takes too much from me, 
And yet to rock and river
    He gives eternity.

The fountain shivers lightly in the rain,
    The laurels drip, the fading roses fall, 
The marble satyr plays a mournful strain
    That leaves the rainy fragrance musical.

Oh dripping laurel, Phoebus sacred tree,
    Would that swift Daphne's lot might come to me, 
Then would I still my soul and for an hour
    Change to a laurel in the glancing shower.

The moon grows out of the hills
    A yellow flower, 
The lake is a dreamy bride
    Who waits her hour.

Beauty has filled my heart,
    It can hold no more, 
It is full, as the lake is full,
    From shore to shore.