Love Songs | Page 9

God, then I shall find Him,
If none can find Him,
then I shall sleep soundly,
Knowing how well on earth your love
sufficed me,

A lamp in darkness.
IV
A November Night
There! See the line of lights,
A chain of stars down either side the
street --
Why can't you lift the chain and give it to me,
A necklace
for my throat? I'd twist it round
And you could play with it. You
smile at me
As though I were a little dreamy child
Behind whose
eyes the fairies live. . . . And see,
The people on the street look up at
us
All envious. We are a king and queen,
Our royal carriage is a
motor bus,
We watch our subjects with a haughty joy. . . .
How still
you are! Have you been hard at work
And are you tired to-night? It is
so long
Since I have seen you -- four whole days, I think.
My heart
is crowded full of foolish thoughts
Like early flowers in an April
meadow,
And I must give them to you, all of them,
Before they
fade. The people I have met,
The play I saw, the trivial, shifting
things
That loom too big or shrink too little, shadows
That hurry,
gesturing along a wall,
Haunting or gay -- and yet they all grow real

And take their proper size here in my heart
When you have seen
them. . . . There's the Plaza now, A lake of light! To-night it almost
seems
That all the lights are gathered in your eyes,
Drawn
somehow toward you. See the open park
Lying below us with a
million lamps
Scattered in wise disorder like the stars.
We look
down on them as God must look down
On constellations floating
under Him
Tangled in clouds. . . . Come, then, and let us walk

Since we have reached the park. It is our garden,
All black and
blossomless this winter night,
But we bring April with us, you and I;

We set the whole world on the trail of spring.
I think that every
path we ever took
Has marked our footprints in mysterious fire,

Delicate gold that only fairies see.

When they wake up at dawn in
hollow tree-trunks
And come out on the drowsy park, they look

Along the empty paths and say, "Oh, here
They went, and here, and

here, and here! Come, see,
Here is their bench, take hands and let us
dance
About it in a windy ring and make
A circle round it only they
can cross
When they come back again!" . . . Look at the lake -- Do
you remember how we watched the swans
That night in late October
while they slept?
Swans must have stately dreams, I think. But now

The lake bears only thin reflected lights
That shake a little. How I
long to take
One from the cold black water -- new-made gold
To
give you in your hand! And see, and see,
There is a star, deep in the
lake, a star!
Oh, dimmer than a pearl -- if you stoop down
Your
hand could almost reach it up to me. . . .
There was a new frail yellow moon to-night --
I wish you could have
had it for a cup
With stars like dew to fill it to the brim. . . .
How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog
around them, see!
What if the air should grow so dimly white
That
we would lose our way along the paths
Made new by walls of moving
mist receding
The more we follow. . . . What a silver night!
That
was our bench the time you said to me
The long new poem -- but how
different now,
How eerie with the curtain of the fog
Making it
strange to all the friendly trees!
There is no wind, and yet great
curving scrolls
Carve themselves, ever changing, in the mist.
Walk
on a little, let me stand here watching
To see you, too, grown strange
to me and far. . . .
I used to wonder how the park would be
If one
night we could have it all alone --
No lovers with close arm-encircled
waists
To whisper and break in upon our dreams.
And now we have
it! Every wish comes true!
We are alone now in a fleecy world;

Even the stars have gone. We two alone!
[End of Love Songs.]
{As an item of interest to the reader, the following,
which was at the
end of this edition, is included.
Only the advertisement for the same
author is included}.

By the same author
Rivers to the Sea
"There is hardly another American woman-poet whose poetry is
generally known and loved like that of Sara Teasdale. `Rivers to the
Sea', her latest volume of lyrics, possesses the delicacy of imagery, the
inward illumination, the high vision that characterize the poetry that
will endure the test of time." -- `Review of Reviews'.
"`Rivers to the Sea' is a book of sheer delight. . . . Her touch turns
everything to song." -- Edward J. Wheeler, in `Current Opinion'.
"Sara Teasdale's lyrics have the