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For A Dance
By Edgar Lee Masters
There is in the dance
The joy of children on a May day lawn.
The fragments of old dreams and dead romance
Come to us from the dancers who are gone.
What strains of ancient blood
Move quicker to the music's passionate beat?
I see the gulls fly over a shadowy flood
And Munster fields of barley and of wheat.
And I see sunny France,
And the vine's tendrils quivering to the light,
And faces, faces, yearning for the dance
With wistful eyes that look on our delight.
They live through us again
And we through them, who wish for lips and eyes
Wherewith to feel, not fancy, the old pain
Passed with reluctance through the centuries
To us, who in the maze
Of dancing and hushed music woven afresh
Amid the shifting mirrors of hours and days
Know not our spirit, neither know our flesh;
Nor what ourselves have been,
Through the long way that brought us to the dance:
I see a little green by Camolin
And odorous orchards blooming in Provence.
Two listen to the roar
Of waves moon-smitten, where no steps intrude.
Who knows what lips were kissed at Laracor?
Or who it was that walked through Burnham wood?
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