So I have learnt at last that I was meant

As the sad solitary instrument

For Life to play upon beyond my reach.

I am dumb silence broken into speech

By everything around me everywhere:

The squirrel on the bough crooked and bent,

The high-born rainbow hanging in the air,

The crimson crab that crawls across the beach,

All these are my musicians . . . each

Of them, without its knowing, brings

Its individual music to my strings.

How little those who say they know me, know

My miracles of moods that come and go

Unseen, unnoticed and unheard,

Changing from hour to hour.

I am as sorrowful as any bird

Deep in the woodlands singing all in vain . . .

I am as bruised as any wayside flower

Exposed to wind and rain . . .

Still as a mountain in a storm, I keep

A stern, untroubled, ever-wakeful sleep,

And yet, upon the surface, I am loud

And terrible as any tempest cloud,

For all invisibly, the players play

Upon my strings the livelong night and day.

Flame-fingered desire

Touches me into tunes of living fire,

Black-garmented despair in rapture strikes

The saddest tune it likes . . .

And love as white as lilies and doves

Plays on my heart the silence that is love's,

While death, immortal, immemorial friend

Seated behind all song with life his mate,

Whispers to her–I have not long to wait,

For songs of love and longing swiftly end.

Burst my soul into a blood-red flower

And put it in your black hair.

Break, in the silence of my soul's deep hour, I

A rose out of my despair.

Make me a roadway for the creaking cart

Of all your heavy pain.

O unborn flower, make a cloud of my heart

To burst for your sake into rain.