Past love will love remain when hearts grow cold -
and what was grown with warmth will still bear fruit
when women weep, and lonely men grow old,
regretting former flame could take no root.
Passion to passion called across the sea,
or seemed 'twas so; the home beneath the hill
where fairies on the wing were said to be,
was found to be a figment of the will.
And yet, for all that longing is no life,
the grand imagining was warm and real.
The rainbow could not take a fairy wife *,
but gained a love that reason cannot steal;
poets are lonely men without their themes,
but words can make new worlds from hopes and dreams.