Sunday Morning |  | 1 |  | Complacencies of the peignoir, and late | Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, | And the green freedom of a cockatoo | Upon a rug mingle to dissipate | The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. | She dreams a little, and she feels the dark | Encroachment of that old catastrophe, | As a calm darkens among water-lights. | Then pungent oranges and bright, green wings | Seem things in some procession of the dead, | Winding across wide water, without sound. | The day is like wide water, without sound, | Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet | over the seas, to silent Palestine, | Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. |  | 2 |  | Why should she give her bounty to the dead? | What is divinity if it can come | Only in silent shadows and in dreams? | Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, | In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else | In any balm or beauty of the earth, | Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? | Divinity must live within herself: | Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; | Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued | Elations when the forest blooms; gusty | Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; | All pleasures and all pains, remembering | The bough of summer and the winter branch. | These are the measures destined for her soul. |  | 3 |  | Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. | No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave | Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind. | He moved among us, as a muttering king, | Magnificent, would move among his hinds, | Until our blood, commingling, virginal, | With heaven, brought such requital to desire | The very hinds discerned it, in a star. | Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be | The blood of paradise? And shall the earth | Seem all of paradise that we shall know? | The sky will be much friendlier then than now, | A part of labor and a part of pain, | And nex in plory to enduring love, | Not this dividing and indifferent blue. |  | 4 |  | She says, "I am content when wakened birds, | Before they fly, test the reality | Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; | But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields | Return no more, where, then, is paradise?" | There is not any haunt of prophesy, | Nor any old chimera of the grave, | Neither the golden underground, nor isle | Melodious, where spirits gat them home, | Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm | Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured | As April's green endures; or will endure | Like her remembrance of awakened birds, | Or her desire for June and evening, tipped | By the consummation of the swallow's wings. |  | 5 |  | She says, "But in contentment I still feel | The need of some imperishable bliss." | Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, | Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams | And our desires. Although she strews the leaves | Of sure obliteration on our paths, | Th path sick sorrow took, the many paths | Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love | Whispered a little out of tenderness, | She makes the willow shiver in the sun | For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze | Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. | She causes boys to pile new plums and pears | On disregarded plate. The maidens taste | And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. |  | 6 |  | Is there no change of death in paradise? | Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs | Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, | Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, | With rivers like our own that seek for seas | They never find, the same receding shores | That never touch with inarticulate pang? | Why set the pear upon those river-banks | Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? | Alas, that they should wear our colors there, | The silken weavings of our afternoons, | And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! | Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, | Within whose burning bosom we devise | Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. |  | 7 |  | Supple and turbulent, a ring of men | Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn | Their boisterous devotion to the sun, | Not as a god, but as a god might be, | Naked among them, like a savage source. | Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, | Out of their blood, returning to the sky; | And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, | The windy lake wherein their lord delights, | The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, | That choir among themselves long afterward. | They shall know well the heavenly fellowship | Of men that perish and of summer morn. | And whence they came and whither they shall go | The dew upon their feet shall manifest. |  | 8 |  | She hears, upon that water without sound, | A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine | Is not the porch of spirits lingering. | It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay." | We live in an old chaos of the sun, | Or old dependency of day and night, | Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, | Of that wide water, inescapable. | Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail | Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; | Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; | And, in the isolation of the sky, | At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make | Ambiguous undulations as they sink, | Downward to darkness, on extended wings. |