Poetry Explorer


Classic and Contemporary Poetry


LAKE LEMAN by FREDERICK WILLIAM HENRY MYERS

First Line: AND ALL IS OVER; AND AGAIN I STAND
Last Line: DIMLY THE HOPE WE TWAIN WERE CALLED UNTO.
Subject(s): GENEVA (LAKE), SWITZERLAND; LEMAN, LAKE;

AND all is over; and again I stand,
O Love, alone on our remembered strand!
And hills and waters all the dreamy day
Melt each in each thro' silvery haze and grey,
And Jaman takes the sunset, Jura knows
Beyond the liquid plains the morning rose.

Lake of the lone, the exiled, the oppressed,
What sighs have wandered o'er thy sea-blue breast
What gaze has watched the suns that could not save
Flame from thy hills and fade upon thy wave!
Great men and fallen upon thy shores have shed
Their few slow tears for fame and fortune fled;
Sad men and wise have been content to see
In thy cold calm their last felicity.
And now thy sunlit vault, these walls of thine,
Seem an unroofed and angel-haunted shrine,
Fair as my love, bright with her vanished bloom,
Stilled with her woe and sacred as her tomb.

For here she stood, and here she spoke, and there
Raised her soft look thro' the evening's crimsoned air
And all she looked was lovely; all she said
Simple, and sweet, and full of tears unshed;
And my soul sprang to meet her, and I knew
Dimly the hope we twain were called unto.



Home: PoetryExplorer.net