Woman Walking on the Seashore towards Her Lover

I saw Night striding white-limbed from the sea
Across the pale, wet sand. The Sun shone still
Over the yellow fields; translucent trees
Bathed on the cliffs, dropping deep purple veils
Upon mauve rocks worn glassy by the tide.
A fringe of foam blurred softly on the shore
Whence rose the faint susurrus of the sphere
That hangs in space, quired by the flocking waves.
I looked and thought to see the silver Moon
High on the rocky shoulder of the bay,
But the bright corn, a sea of greenish gold
Asleep in the Sun's eye, very slowly heaved;
And then I knew I looked upon my love
Who steals like Night into a sunny world
And dulls the day's bright girdle of stone hills.
Nearer she came; the Sun went slowly out,
And all the bright sea shrank into her gaze,
Wherein I saw the stars untimely stream
With many shining waters panoplied.
A black wind blown, her hair untunable
Fell tumbling from her small, melodious profile:
And I stood still and longed to hear her voice,
Shadow of falling water in sunned rocks,
Sprung from the caves within this hollow world
Where silver music rings perpetually,
Lulling the stones crouched in the dim unseen
Until they take the shapes of gods and idols,
And this world's imaged in a sea of blood.
It was the sea of blood I looked upon
Wherein those simulacra, Sun and Moon,
Do rise and set, and there a ghostly tide
Chimes many a bubbling, too-bright apparition
On the still cliff of flesh wherefrom we gaze—
Hallucination of a bell angelical
In the still air, as though o'er earth's shore rolled
Silver susurrus of the Moon's bright sphere.