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Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung
aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s
patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of
pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen
mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –
No – yet still stedfast,
still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel
for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still,
still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to
death.