19. An Old Song of Youthful Days

I was not thinking of Rose;
Rose and I went to the woods;
We spoke of something—who knows?
I no longer remember our words.

I was as cold as marble;
I walked with absent tread;
I spoke of trees, of myrtle;
‘What now?’ it seemed she said.

The dew offered its pearls,
The thicket its sunshine shade;
I walked; I heard blackbirds,
And Rose the nightingale.

I, sixteen, was quite morose.
She, twenty; her eyes agleam.
The nightingales sang of Rose,
And the blackbirds whistled at me.

Rose, standing tall and fine,
Raised her lovely, trembling arm
To pluck a blackberry from its vine;
I did not see her white arm.

A stream, cool and deep, spilled,
Over stones velvet-mossed;
And nature, love-filled,
Slept in the vast woods, hushed.

Rose unfastened her shoe,
And, with an artless air, put
Her small foot in the water blue;
I did not see her bare foot.

I didn’t know what to say the while;
I followed her through the trees,
Seeing her sometimes smile,
And sometimes sigh unease.

I only saw how lovely she was
Leaving these vast, hushed ways.
‘So,’ she said; ‘let’s think it no more’.
Since then, I have thought of it always.

Paris, June 1831.