Words

Words, breathing words, full--murmuring syllables!
How you enrich the thoughts that dwell in you
With far--brought perfume, that no meaning tells
Yet stirs the mind to flower in thoughts anew!

Sometimes how lulling like the rain's soft veil,
Then vivid as the pressure of a hand,
Now filled with fair surmises like a sail.
Before the blue coast of some foreign land.

O words, you live and therefore you can die,
Ill--yoked, imprisoned, tamed in a dull task!
So callous tongues may use you, but not I,
Who for your grace, a wooing lover, ask.

Dead things may kill; and you being dead entomb
The frozen thought that once you clothed in bloom.