How can I tell thee when I love thee best?
In rapture or repose? how shall I say?
I only know I love thee every way,
Plumed for love’s flight, or folded in love’s nest.
See, what is day but night bedewed with rest?
And what the night except the tired-out day?
And ’tis love’s difference, not love’s decay,
If now I dawn, now fade, upon thy breast.
Self-torturing sweet! Is’t not the self-same sun
Wanes in the west that flameth in the east,
His fervour nowise altered nor decreased?
So rounds my love, returning where begun,
And still beginning, never most nor least,
But fixedly various, all love’s parts in one.
Alfred Austin (1835 – 1913) was an English journalist and a poet who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, after an interval following the death of Tennyson, when the other candidates had either caused controversy or simply refused the honor. It was claimed that he was being rewarded for his support for the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury in the General Election of 1895.