Serenade

Lady, light in the east hangs low,
Draw your veils of dream apart,
Under the casement stands Pierrot
Making a song to ease his heart.
(Yet do not break the song too soon—
I love to sing in the paling moon.)

The petals are falling heavy with dew,
The stars have fainted out of the sky,
Come to me, come, or else I too,
Faint with the weight of love will die.
(She comes—alas, I hoped to make
another stanza for her sake!)

-Pierrot’s Song — Sara Teasdale

Sainted Juliet! dearest name!
If to love be life alone,
Divinest Juliet,
I love thee, and live; and yet
Love unreturned is like the fragrant flame
Folding the slaughter of the sacrifice
Offered to gods upon an altar-throne;
My heart is lighted at thine eyes,
Changed into fire, and blown about with sighs.

To Juliet — Alfred Tennyson

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

When You Are Old — William Butler Yeats

Of all things, lady, be not proud;
Inter not beauty in that shroud
Wherein the living waste, the dead,
Unwept and unremembered,
Decay. Beauty beats so. frail a wing;
Suffer men to gaze, poets to sing
How radiant you are, compare
And favor you to that most rare
Bird of delight: a lovely face
Matched with an equal inner grace.
Sweet bird, beware the Fowler, Pride;
His knots once neatly crossed and tied,
The prey is caged and walled about
With no way in and no way out.

Advice to a Beauty — Countee Cullen

For the Most Improbable She — Ogden Nash
(reprint permission not obtained)

Serenade — Robert Hillyer
(reprint permission not obtained)