If...?
SO you but love me, be it your own way,
In your own time, no sooner than you will,
No warmer than you would from day to day,
But love me still!
Each day that still you love me seems to me
A little fairer than the day before;
For, daily given, love’s least must daily be
A little more.
And be my most gain’d your least given, if such
Your sweet will be! I reckon not the cost,
Nor count the gain, by little or by much,
Or least or most.
Little or much, to me the gift I crave
Is all in all. There is not any measure
Of more or less can gauge the need I have
Of that dear treasure.
So you but love me, tho’ your love be cold,
Mine it can chill not. Tho’ your love come late,
Mine for its coming, by sweet dreams foretold,
Will dreaming wait.
Yet ah, if some fair chance, before I die,
One hour of waking life might let me live,
Rich with the dream’d-of dear reality
’Tis yours to give!
Your whole sweet self, with your sweet self’s whole love!
Those eyes of fire and dew, those lips wish-haunted,
Those feet whose steps like elfin music move
Thro’ worlds enchanted!
Your whole sweet self! The unutter’d thoughts that stir
Your lonest musings with light wings unheard,
And feelings that find no interpreter
In deed or word!
Your whole sweet self, that till by love reveal’d
Even to yourself still half unknown must be!
For of the wealth in souls like yours conceal’d
Love keeps the key.
Ah, if your whole sweet self, by all the power
Of your sweet self’s whole love in some divine
Far distant hour made wholly yours, that hour
Made wholly mine,
And if in that blest hour all dreams came true,
All doubts dissolved, all fears were whirl’d away
In one wild storm of tendernesses new
As time’s first day,
What should we both be? Hush! I do not dare
Even to hear my own heart’s whisper utter’d.
Be its sole answerer the silent air
This sigh has flutter’d!
Robert, Lord Lytton.