She standeth silent as a thought
Too sacred to be uttered; all
Her face unfurling like a flower
That at a breath too near will shut.
Her life a little golden clock
Whose shining hands, arrested, stay
Forever at the hour of Love.
She doubts, she dares, she dreams—of what?
I ask; she, shrinking, answers not,
She swims before me, dim, a cup
Of waste, untasted tenderness.
I drink, I dread, until I seem
(Myself unto myself) to be
He whom she chose, and charmed—and missed,
On some faint Asiatic day
Of languorous summer, ages since.
SEALED.
"Shall I pour you the wine," she said,
"The wine that is rare and red?
Sweeter the cup for the drop."—
"But why do you shrink and stop?"
"The seal of the wine
Has a sacred sign;
I am afraid," she said.
"I love and revere
You more for your fear,
Than I do for your wine," he said.
GUINEVERE.
Of Guinevere from Arthur separate,
And separate from Launcelot and the world,
And shielded in the convent with her sin,
As one draws fast a veil upon a face
That 's marred, but only holds the scar more close
Against the burning brain—I read to-day
This legend; and if other yet than I
Have read, or said, how know I? for the text
Was written in the story we have learned,
Between the ashen lines, invisible,
In hieroglyphs that blazed and leaped like light
Unto the eyes. A thousand times we read;
A thousand turn the page and understand,
And think we know the record of a life,
When lo! if we will open once again
The awful volume, hid, mysterious,
Intent, there lies the unseen alphabet—
Re-reads the tale from breath to death, and spells
A living language that we never knew.