Keeping a Heart

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

1844 to 1881

Poem Image
Track 1

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Every 10th word

If one should give me a heart to keep, 
With love for the golden key,
The giver might at ease or sleep;
It should ne’er know pain, weary, or weep, 
The heart watched over by me.

I would keep that heart as a temple fair,
heathen should look therein;
Its chaste marmoreal beauty rare
only should know, and to enter there 
I hold myself from sin.

I would keep that heart a casket hid 
Where precious jewels are ranged,
memory each; as you raise the lid,
You think love again as you did 
Of old, and seems changed.

How I should tremble day after day, 
As I touched with the golden key, 
Lest in the heart were changed, or say 
That had stolen one thought away 
And it did open to me.

But ah, I should know that so well, 
As a heart so loving and true, 
As a heart that I held with a spell, 
That so long as I changed not could foretell 
That heart would be changeless too.

would keep that heart as the thought of heaven, 
To dwell in a life apart,
My good should done, my gift be given,
In hope of the there; yea, even
My life should be led in heart.

And so on the eve of some blissful day, 
From within we should close the door 
glimmering splendours of love, and stay 
In that shut up from the world away,
Never to open more.