Exsquisite Melancholy

Time is like a shadow bright It fades and never can requite A lip, a shade, a palest kiss The sorrow that my heart did wish Clasped upon the rose and chain When fate cannot thus so agonize Time my love so silhouettes As though a vogue of deep regret These words of subtle renaissance Is the cross that beauty haunts When the vampire of my love hath gave No touch thus blossomed on the grave Where love it’s final rose hath laid, Ife a cross of tragic waste A ghost unkissed that none can save Whom haunts upon the untomb’d hills Of souls no sorry hath so filled Save in an orb of perfect form Which revolves its orbit ever more Like words of God I whisper thus To become no wretch of love untrue. Time, my love, a shadow makes Beyond where memories never wake And shades of fate do silhouette The seas and evening’s last regret When I alone in loneliness of all I ever did desire Shouldst ever neath a cross aspire To see the sunlight rise again Within a coffin made of stone Without my dark and final home My heart in chains of irony athralled the romaunt of this lost abyss the seas that thrall the mortal chains of every tear so phantom-like shouldst thus beneath a cross restrain shouldst fall ineluctable as though a ghost whose heart bereft yea! ghost of every thought our love has kept when the iron hand is turned throughout the world of circumstance. No soul! No solace! No sepulcher! On seas of sorrow my soul has thrived Into the sunlight of my tears, Where eternal is the cross of mine. Yet despair! I do not so enthrall Nor linger in its gothic halls Where haunts a sorrow so forlorn The chords of fate are thus so torn. Shall not a kiss at last confess till every silhouette of love regrets the time which did thus or less rendezvous with true affair for how should a moment thus unbe unequal to my tis a thee? Yet if a shadow thus can reach Just like a phantom in the fire As far as any shadow can beseech To fall beneath the final breach Every pillar made of stone Into the coffin of my soul Where all my life is laid To find my way across the sea And back to my surreal belief That shadows conspire to be free. Yet if a gothic lash of love Shouldst caress my very soul As though a lover loved untouched Couldst thus become unloved In shadows I like woes do dream Of all that never never seemed as though in darkness a faith did boast what faith a face did not so recognize when met by those most solemn stars that ever like the cross are ours. My sorrow should confess so close Thus a prince and pauper I become The pauper prince of love! Thus now I see with gothic eyes Thy shape as chased by candelight As grey as melancholy in the shadowlight Where every shadow left bereft As grey as melancholy I regret One season and a shadow knows Whose shape reflects no shade to show as far as vast beyond the phantom sea thus like fate shall thrive in misery though fate fortell what I believe yet if in visions vast as true as God or man hath given you then all my souls so lost forlorn shall not thus regret no heart untorn o wraith of my most forlorn woe my heart no tear my shadow knows upon a cross of gothic light