“Love is Not AllLove is not all: it is not meat nor drinkNor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.”

“Yet here one time your spirit was wont to move;Here might I hope to find you day or night,And here I come to look for you, my love,Even now, foolishly, knowing you are dead.”

“Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sunThat will not rise again.Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charityThat lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.That this could be!That I should live to seeMost vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,So fitted out with purple robe and crownTo stand among his betters! Face to faceWith outraged me in this once holy place,Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and huntedTruth was harboured out of danger,He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger!I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:The hills may shift, the waters may decline,Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,But never your love from me, your hand from mine.Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!You, too, farewell,-but fare not well enough to dreamYou have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.”

“And what are you that, missing you,I should be kept awakeAs many nights as there are daysWith weeping for your sake?And what are you that, missing you,As many days as crawlI should be listening to the windAnd looking at the wall?I know a man that’s a braver manAnd twenty men as kind,And what are you, that you should beThe one man in my mind?Yet women’s ways are witless ways,As any sage will tell,—And what am I, that I should loveSo wisely and so well?”

“SHE is neither pink nor pale, And she never will be all mine; She learned her hands in a fairy-tale, And her mouth on a valentine. She has more hair than she needs; In the sun ’tis a woe to me! And her voice is a string of colored beads, Or steps leading into the sea. She loves me all that she can, And her ways to my ways resign; But she was not made for any man, And she never will be all mine.”

“Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;In my own way, and with my full consent.Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarelyWent to their deaths more proud than this one went.Some nights of apprehension and hot weepingI will confess; but that's permitted me;Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keepingRubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.If I had loved you less or played you slylyI might have held you for a summer more,But at the cost of words I value highly,And no such summer as the one before.Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,I shall have only good to say of you.”

“My heart is warm with the friends I make,And better friends I'll not be knowing,Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,No matter where it's going.”