«O love, my love! Awake with my strong will
Of loving to Olympus and be there
The latest god, whose honey-coloured hair
Takes divine eyes! As thou wert on earth, still
In heaven bodifully be and roam,
A prisoner of that happiness of home,
With elder gods, while I on earth do make
A statue for thy deathlessness' seen sake.
«That deathless statue of thee I shall build
Will be no stone thing, but my great regret
By which our love's eternity is willed.
My sorrow shall make thee its god, and set
Thy naked presence on the parapet
That looks over the seas of future times.
Some shall say all our love was vice and crimes.
Others against our names, as stones, shall whet
The knife of their glad hate of beauty, and make
Our name a pillory, a scaffold and a stake
Whereon to burn our brothers yet unborn.
Yet shall our presence, like eternal morn,
Ever return at Beauty's hour, and shine
Out of the East of Love, and be the shrine
Of future gods that nothing human scorn.
«My love for thee is part of what thou wert
And shall be part of what thy statue will be.
Our double presence unified in thee
Shall make to beat many a future heart.
Ay, were't a statue to be broken and missed,
Yet its stone-perfect memory
Would, still more perfect, on Time's shoulders borne,
Overlook the great Morn
From an eternal East.
«Thy statue is of thyself and of me.
Our dual presence has its unity
In that perfection of body, which my love,
In loving it, did out of mortal life
Raise into godness, set above the strife
Of times and changing passions far above.
«The end of days, when Jove is born again,
And Ganymede again pour at his feast,
Shall see our dual soul from death released
And recreated unto love, joy, pain,
Life—all the beauty and the vice and lust,
All the diviner side of flesh, flesh-staged.
And, if our very memory wore to dust,
By the giant race of the end of ages must
Our dual presence once again be raised.»
It rained still. But slow-treading night came in
Closing the weary eyelids of each sense.
The very consciousness of self and soul
Grew, like a landscape through dim raining, dim.
The Emperor lay still, so still that now
He half forgot where now he lay, or whence
The sorrow that was still salt on his lips.
All had been something very far, a scroll
Rolled up. The things he felt were like the rim
That haloes round the moon when the night weeps.
His head was bowed into his arms, and they
On the low couch, foreign to his sense, lay.
His closed eyes seemed open to him and seeing
The naked floor, dark, cold, sad and unmeaning.
His hurting breath was all his sense could know.
Out of the falling darkness the wind rose
And fell. A voice swooned in the courts below.
And the Emperor slept.
The gods came now
And bore something away, no sense knows how,
On unseen arms of power and repose.