“Love”

 

Before Love came― 
(The rose lifts up its head and longs for rain)  
Before Love came I sang of Love― 
Its joy, its pain. 
But when Love came― 
(The rose beneath the longed-for rain is bent) 
But when Love came―its joy, its pain― 
All my song went. 

“Love” as it appears in Higginson’s When the Birds Go North Again (1898).