TRIP TO ELTHAM PALACE POEM 45

Poems have been of a Romantic nature, as well as the philosophical nature. To pen an ode to your love is a dangerous thing, as you reveal how you feel intimately and explicitly in language. Usually love or attraction is expressed in the body movements of a person and eventually in habit. A poem declares something more than this.

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“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” Augustine of Hippo

Interruption

Like a tired child I mourn,

As I like the tempest’s rage,

Find that our covered idyll,

Has been rudely invaded.

How dare they take you from me,

As much as I love you and need you?

Perplexed I look at the map of our life,

And find you at a distance.

How can this be? That they take

You from me, when you are mine?

Promised to me, I did not understand,

That life’s hand would interrupt us.

If I could bind you to myself,

Like those plants sinuous on great trees,

I would, but alas, I am no great oak,

And so you are free.

So I must content myself to writing

To you once more at a distance,

As if my pen were singing a song,

To let you know you do me wrong.

“…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.” Homer