Love
Fragment of Ballad: 'How shall I sing?'
From The Poetical Works, ed. John Nichol (1875), vol. 2
How shall I sing? the thing I crave
To say is speechless as a Lover's trance.
How shall I give to thee
What even now is all so wholly thine
That but by losing thee in me
Or me in thee it never can be mine?
As a sliding wave of sliding sea
Before my following hand doth dance
Ever and ever onward to the shore,
And breaks and is a thousand things at once,
And from the moment's multiplicity
Takes itself up again into a wave:
So all I feel and see
Breaks to the thousand-fold of Fate and Chance,
But from the moment's multiplicity
Takes itself up into the thought of thee.
Cite this poem
MLA
Dobell, Sydney. “Fragment of Ballad: 'How shall I sing?'.” Poetry Codex, poetrycodex.com/poem/dobell/118/.
Chicago
Dobell, Sydney. “Fragment of Ballad: 'How shall I sing?'.” Poetry Codex. https://poetrycodex.com/poem/dobell/118/.
Read this poem with the Codex →