All night above that garden the rose-flushed moon will sail, Making the darkness deeper where hides the nightingale. Below the Sabine mountain The tossed and slender fountain Will curve, a lily pale; And where the plumed pine soars tallest, 'Tis there, O nightingale, thou callest; Where the loud water leaps the highest. 'Tis there, O nightingale, thou criest; In the dripping luscious dark, Hark, oh, hark! Wonderful, delirious, Soul of joy mysterious.
A garden full of fragrances, Of pauses and of cadences, Whence come they all? Of cypresses and ilex-trees, Plumes and dark candles like to these Were long ago Persephone's.
All night within that garden The glimmering gods of stone, The satyrs and the naiads Will laugh to be alone, In starless courts of shadows By silence overgrown, Save for the nightingale's Wild lyric thither blown.
By pools and dusky closes Dim shapes will move about, Twirled wands and masks and faces, Dancers and wreaths of roses, The moonlight's trick, no doubt. A naked nymph upon the stair, A sculptured vine that clasps the air,-- And then one Bacchic bird somewhere Will pour his passion out. All night above that garden the rose-flushed moon will sail, Making the darkness deeper where hides the nightingale.
Down yonder velvet alley, Floats Daphne like a feather, A finger bidding silence, The dark and she together. Look, where the secret fount is misting. Apollo, thou shalt have thy trysting: For where a ruined sphinx lay smiling The wood-girl waits thee, white, beguiling. All night above that garden the rose-flushed moon will sail, Making the darkness deeper where hides the nightingale.
The wind is Winter, though the sun be Spring: The icy rills have scarce begun to flow; The birds unconfidently fly and sing.
As on the land once fell the northern foe, The hostile mountains from the passes fling Their vandal blasts upon the lake below.
Not yet the round clouds of the Maytime cling Above the world's blue wonder's curving show, And tempt to linger with their lingering.
Yet doth each slope a vernal promise know: See, mounting yonder, white as angel's wing. A snow of bloom to meet the bloom of snow.
Love, need we more than our imagining To make the whole year May? What though The wind be Winter if the heart be Spring?