Arthur Symons

The feverish room and that white bed, The tumbled skirts upon a chair, The novel flung half-open, where Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread; The mirror that has sucked your face Into its secret deep of deeps, And there mysteriously keeps Forgotten memories of grace; And you half dressed and half awake, Your slant eyes strangely watching me, And I, who watch you drowsily, With eyes that, having slept not, ache; This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?) Will rise, a ghost of memory, if Ever again my handkerchief Is scented with White Heliotrope.

There's a flutter of grey through the trees: Ah, the exquisite curves of her dress as she passes Fleet with her feet on the path where the grass is! I see not her face, I but see The swift re-appearance, the flitting persistence— There!—of that flutter of grey in the distance. It has flickered and fluttered away: What a teasing regret she has left in my day-dream, And what dreams of delight are the dreams that one may dream! It was only a flutter of grey; But the vaguest of raiment's impossible chances Has set my heart beating the way of old dances.

I To dream of love, and, waking, to remember you: As though, being dead, one dreamed of heaven, and woke in hell. At night my lovely dreams forget the old farewell: Ah! wake not by his side, lest you remember too! II I set all Rome between us: with what joy I set The wonder of the world against my world's delight! Rome, that hast conquered worlds, with intellectual might Capture my heart, and teach my memory to forget!

Here, where God lives among the trees, Where birds and monks the whole day sing His praises in a pleasant ease, O heart, might we not find a home Here, after all our wandering? These gates are closed, even on Rome. Souls of the twilight wander here; Here, in the garden of that death Which was for love's sake, need we fear How sharp with bitter joy might be Love's lingering, last, longed-for breath, Shut in upon eternity?

Side by side through the streets at midnight, Roaming together, Through the tumultuous night of London, In the miraculous April weather. Roaming together under the gaslight, Day’s work over, How the Spring calls to us, here in the city, Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover! Cool to the wind blows, fresh in our faces, Cleansing, entrancing, After the heat and the fumes and the footlights, Where you dance and I watch your dancing. Good it is to be here together, Good to be roaming, Even in London, even at midnight, Lover-like in a lover’s gloaming. You the dancer and I the dreamer, Children together, Wandering lost in the night of London, In the miraculous April weather.