Sleeping Beauty Poetry

Rue Des Vents: 4
[Sleeping Beauty]
by Arthur Davison Ficke
(1883–1945)

Be wise, be wise, O heart forever seeking
A wine whose fever must the goblet break!
Let now the Sleeping Beauty lie a-sleeping;
Her lips could not speak sweeter did she wake.
Her dreams may last some happy moments still
Before the dawn’s first resonance of grey
Shall stir the east and, growing swiftly, fill
Her soul with joy and terror of the day.
Yet as the Sleeper lifts her quiet eyes
And to my troubled gaze their laughing glow
With loveliness and love of love replies,
I know that she has dreamed more than I know—
And lights outshining wisdom flush and start,
And summer sweeps wild wings across my heart.

from "Rue Des Vents," Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter (1922).