I Loved A Vision by John Clark

I lost the love of heaven above,
I spurned the lust of earth below.
I felt the sweets of fancied love,
And hell itself my only foe.

I lost earth's joys, but felt the glow
Of heaven's flame abound in me,
Till loveliness and I did grow
The bard of immortality. 
I loved but woman fell away,
hid me from her faded flame,
I snatched the sun's eternal rays
here life will fade like visioned dreams
and mountains darken into caves,
maiden, wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity,
here parents live and are forgot,
and sisters live and know us not?

Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
In this strange death of life to be,
To live in death and be the same
Without this life, or home, or name,
at once to be and not to be
That was and is not-yet to see
Things pass like shadows and the sky hove,
below, around us lie?
The land of shadows wilt thou trace,
And look, nor know each other's face;
The present mixed with reasons gone,
And past and present all as one?
Say, maiden, can thy life be led
To join the living with the dead,
Then trace thy footsteps on with me;
We're wed to one eternity.

Love(III)
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"

GEORGE HERBERT
[1593-1633]

Secret Love
I hid my love when young while I
Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly;
I hid my love to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light:
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in each place;
Where'er I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love good-bye.
I met her in the greenest dells,
Where dewdrops pearl the wood bluebells;
The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye,
The bee kissed and went singing by,
A sunbeam found a passage there,
A gold chain round her neck so fair;
As secret as the wild bee's song
She lay there all the summer long.

I hid my love in field and town
Till even the breeze would knock me down;
The bees seemed singing ballads o'er,
The fly's buss turned a lion's roar;
And even silence found a tongue,
To haunt me all the summer long;
The riddle nature could not prove
Was nothing else but secret love.

JOHN CLARKE

Piano
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling
Strings  and pressing the small, poised feet of a mother
who smiles as she  sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato.  
The glamour Of childish days is upon me,
My manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance,
I weep like a child for the past.  (Anon.)