Fragment of Ballad
How shall I sing? the thing I crave
To say is speechless as a Lover’s trance.
How shall I give to thee
What even now is all so wholly thine
That but by losing thee in me
Or me in thee it never can be mine?
As a sliding wave of sliding sea
Before my following hand doth dance
Ever and ever onward to the shore,
And breaks and is a thousand things at once,
And from the moment’s multiplicity
Takes itself up again into a wave:
So all I feel and see
Breaks to the thousand-fold of Fate and Chance,
But from the moment’s multiplicity
Takes itself up into the thought of thee.
