To Wilhelmina

To Wilhelmina

A white face, drooping, on a bending neck:

A tube-rose that with heavy petal curves

Her stem: a foam-bell on a wave that swerves

Back from the undulating vessel's deck.

From out the whitest cloud of summer steals

The wildest lightning: from this face of thine

Thy soul, a fire-of-heaven, warm and fine,

In marvellous flashes its fair self reveals.

As when one gazes from the summer sea

On some far gossamer cloud, with straining eye,

Fearing to see it vanish in the sky,

So, floating, wandering Cloud-Soul, I watch thee.

____
Montgomery, Alabama, 1866.

-THE END-
Sidney Lanier's poem: To Wilhelmina

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