While yet your spirit is free.
Have you not seen, in sleeping,
A lover that might not stay,
And remembered again with weeping
And thought of him through the day
Ah! thought of him long and dearly,
Till you seemed to behold him clearly
And could follow the dull time merely
With heart and love far away?
And what are you thinking and saying,
In the land where you are delaying?
Have you a chain to sever?
Have you a prison to break?
O love! there is one love for ever,
And never another love— never,
And hath it not reached you, my praying?
And singing these years for your sake?
We two made one, should have power
To grow to a beautiful flower,
A tree for men to sit under
Beside life's flowerless stream;
But I without you am only
A dreamer fruitless and lonely;
And you without me, a wonder
In my most beautiful dream.
—Arthur O'Shaughnessy