Summer of Love

Chapter 44: FOR A CHILD

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About This Book

A compact collection of lyrical poems that celebrates romantic devotion, natural imagery, and spiritual yearning, blending playful fairyland pieces, meditative prayers, and occasional urban portraits. The poet favors traditional verse forms such as villanelles and ballades and mixes classical and religious allusion with sensuous descriptions of gardens, moonlight, and birds. Short narrative ballads and elegiac tributes alternate with intimate love lyrics, producing a varied but unified mood of ardor, reverence, and pastoral charm.

FOR A CHILD

His mind has neither need nor power to know

The foolish things that men call right and wrong.

For him the streams of pleasant love-wind flow,

For him the mystic, sleep-compelling song.

Through love he rules his love-made universe,

And sees with eyes by ignorance made keen

The fauns and elves whom older eyes disperse,

Great Pan and all the fairies with their queen.

King gods, I pray, bestow on him this dole,

Not wisdom, wealth, nor mighty deeds to do,

But let him keep his happy pagan soul,

The poet-vision, simple, free and true,

To hunt the rainbow-gold and phantom lights,

And meet with dryads on the wooded heights.