Canto XXXV
Yet if some voice that man could trustShould murmur from the narrow house:The cheeks drop in; the body bows;Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:
Might I not say, yet even here,But for one hour, O Love, I striveTo keep so sweet a thing alive?But I should turn mine ears and hear
The moanings of the homeless sea,The sound of streams that swift or slowDraw down Æonian hills, and sowThe dust of continents to be;
And Love would answer with a sigh,‘The sound of that forgetful shoreWill change my sweetness more and more,Half-dead to know that I shall die.’
O me! what profits it to putAn idle case? If Death were seenAt first as Death, Love had not been,Or been in narrowest working shut,
Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,Or in his coarsest Satyr-shapeHad bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.