For An Antique Lyre

Still wanting you, perchance
How vainly love had waited,
An autumn faun belated
For whom the leaves like spectral dryads dance.

And time perhaps had run
A somber, songless river
Whence no nymph rises ever
With limbs that flash to lotus in the sun.

And happiness had been
A siren singing only
On shores unsought and lonely
Where Vesper falls to some untraveled visne.

And joy had tarried still,
A sleeping Venus hidden
In sunless halls forbidden
Within her undiscovered hollow hill.