"Canticle" by Clark Ashton Smith

In my heart a wizard book,
Only love shall ever look:
Darling, when thou readest there,
Wisely falter and forbear
Ere thou turn'st the pages olden,
Deeply writ and deeply folden,
Where the legends of lost moons
Lie in chill unchanging runes.
Trifle not with charm or spell,
Heptagram or pentacle,
Leave in silence, long unsaid,
All the words that wake the dead.

Darling, in my heart withholden,
Letters rubrical and golden
Tell the secret of our love
And the philtred spells thereof;
There, my memories of thee,
Half of all the gramarie,
Are a firm unfading lore:
Read but these... and read no more...
Shall it profit thee to find
Loves that went with snow and wind?
Leave in silence, long unsaid,
All the words that wake the dead.

----

'find' and 'wind' (moving air) clearly don't rhyme in any modern version of English. I could have forced them to rhyme, but whichever word I changed it would have been too weird, so I just left it non-rhyming.

Even forcing 'pentacle' to rhyme with 'spell' was painful, but that one I could at least do, even if I don't like it.

Heptagram is a seven sided star. Not nearly as well known as the pentagram / pentacle, but sure, why not?

Rubrical, in this context, is: a heading of a part of a book or manuscript done or underlined in a color (in this case, gold) different from the rest

gramarie, obsolete spelling of gramarye, from the middle French gramaire (current spelling being grimoire), so a spell book, especially one of necromancy

Sorry for using a meme for a picture, but it does fit the theme of the poem! And I had no other ideas of what to use here. I probably could have found some medieval painting of a romantic couple or some such, but meh.

To follow along: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/76/canticle