SOLITARY Death, make me thine own.
And let us wander the bare fields together ;
Yea, thou and I alone,
Roving in unembittered unison forever.
I will not harry thy treasure-graves,
I do not ask at thy still hands a lover ;
My heart within me craves
To travel till we twain Time's wilderness discover.
To sojourn with thee my soul was bred,
And I, the courtly sights of life refusing,
To the wide shadows fled.
And mused upon thee often as I fell a-musing.
Escaped from chaos, thy mother Night,
In her maiden breast a burthen that awed her.
By cavern waters white
Drew thee her first-born, her unfathered offspring,
toward her.
On dewy plats, near twilight dingle.
She oft, to still thee from men's sobs and curses
In thine ears a-tingle,
Pours her cool charms, her weird, reviving chaunt
rehearses.
Though mortals menace thee or elude,
And from thy confines break in swift transgression,
Thou for thyself art sued
Of me, I claim thy cloudy purlieus my possession.
To a lone freshwater, where the sea
Stirs the silver flux of the reeds and willows.
Come thou, and beckon me
To lie in the lull of the sand-sequestered billows :
Then take the life I have called my own
And to the liquid universe deliver ;
Loosening my spirit's zone,
Wrap round me as thy limbs the wind, the light,
the river.
