Sonnets. II. “Our love is not a fading, earthly flower”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

OUR love is not a fading, earthly flower:

Its wingèd seed dropped down from Paradise,

And, nursed by day and night, by sun and shower,

Doth momently to fresher beauty rise:

To us the leafless autumn is not bare,

Nor winter’s rattling boughs lack lusty green,

Our summer hearts make summer’s fulness, where

No leaf, or bud, or blossom may be seen:

For nature’s life in love’s deep life doth lie,

Love,—whose forgetfulness is beauty’s death,

Whose mystic key these cells of Thou and I

Into the infinite freedom openeth,

And makes the body’s dark and narrow grate

The wind-flung leaves of Heaven’s palace-gate.