Hymn To Love

We are thine, O Love, being in thee and made of thee,

As thou, Love, were the deep thought

And we the speech of the thought; yea, spoken are we,

Thy fires of thought out-spoken:

But burn’d not through us thy imagining

Like fierce mood in a song caught,

We were as clamour’d words a fool may fling,

Loose words, of meaning broken.

For what more like the brainless speech of a fool,—

The lives travelling dark fears,

And as a boy throws pebbles in a pool

Thrown down abysmal places?

Hazardous are the stars, yet is our birth

And our journeying time theirs;

As words of air, life makes of starry earth

Sweet soul-delighted faces;

As voices are we in the worldly wind;

The great wind of the world’s fate

Is turn’d, as air to a shapen sound, to mind

And marvellous desires.