Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SYMBOLS, by CHARD POWERS SMITH


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SYMBOLS, by                    
First Line: It has been hard to learn that hair
Last Line: He sits his throne. I climb to mine.
Subject(s): Hair; Language; Love; Words; Vocabulary


It has been hard to learn that hair
And hands and eyes I loved just now
Were not themselves, but words somehow
Singing of something everywhere.

That hair was just a golden fire,
No more than sunset, and no less;
And all the busy tenderness
Of hands was only world desire.

That when I looked at loving eyes
And felt the spirit in the draw
Out of the depths, I only saw
As through a lens the quiet skies.

And love's communion was no more
Than comtemplation any night
Of any star, or of the might
Of any surf on any shore.

That as the systems rise and fall,
The thing I am, the thing she was,
Are mingled in the final cause,
And we are One, and that is all.

Where are the million facets cut
Of love? Are they a single gem?
And all the divers lights of them
A rainbow that the sun put out?

Where are the songs of hair and eyes
And hands that I cannot forget?
Not lost, but seperate, singing yet
Their old familiar melodies

In a new, future tongue whose breath
Draws not in flesh but in the sky,
A language I shall learn when I
Hear the translating voice of death.

They are the poetry of love
In the new country just ahead,
Where every light that love has shed
Beacons and moves as the stars above.

We love the meadows we have known.
We love the flowers that must change.
Yet the new summer is not strange,
Nor the old flowers ever gone.
* * * *
I do not envy him in fine
Who scorns the change, and loves the One --
The easy solitude of stone.
He sits his throne. I climb to mine.





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