The Heart's Own Day

A poem by Madison Julius Cawein

This is the heart's own day:
With dreaming eyes
Life seems to look away
Beyond the skies
Into some long-gone May.

A May that can not die;
Across whose hills
Youth's heart goes singing by,
'Mid daffodils,
With Love the young and shy.

Love of the slender form
And elvish face;
Who with uplifted arm
Points to one place
A place of oldtime charm.

Where once the lilies grew
For Love to twine,
With violets, white and blue,
And columbine,
Of gold and crimson hue.

Gone is the long-ago;
Gone like the wind;
And Love we used to know
Sits dumb and blind,
With locks of winter snow.

And by him Memory
Sits sketching back
Into the used-to-be,
In white and black,
One flower on his knee.

One rose, whose crimson gleams
Like Youth's glad heart,
And fills the day with dreams,
And is a part
Of the old love it seems.

That touches with the tints
Of Faeryland
This day; and makes a prince
Of Samarcand,
Of him, whose hand
Hers held in dreams long since.