As a rose bends in rain
Your face is bowed into mine arms,
Spilling its golden drops there:
And the fragrance of wet roses
Is in my nostrils,
And the long bright tendrils of your hair
Upon me.
Under my hand you tremble as a reed
When wind ruffles the water;
Such great joy floweth beneath my fingers,
And the rain passes, and the wind strews
The ripples with crimson petals
Bright as blood upon their polished silver.
But my delight of you
Fragrant and humid in mine arms,
Of a white body convulsive, shaken
With the soul’s passion; lips fierce, eager,
Passes not, but as a song, as a breath passes,
To hide it in a silence, a sleep,
Among cherishing dews, being music:
Nor the mere lute, nor the singer,
But the shaped passion of a god
Embodied in us,
Beyond us, eternal, exultant.
DEMETER MOURNING
I have seen her in sorrow, as one blind
With grief, across the furrows on soiled feet
Pass, as the cold gray dawn came with cold wind,
Gray as fine steel and keen with bitter sleet,
Beneath the white moon waning in the skies:
And I grew holy gazing in her eyes.
Then her voice came: Ah! but thou wert too fair
To seek among the dim realms of the dead
Love: and what hands will tremble in thine hair
Or lips faint on thy lips? The clear stars shed
All night their dews on me: and the wind’s breath
Pierced; and my heart grew hungry too for death.
O flower! O clear pool mirroring the trees,
Whose sight was all my soul! O golden one,
Whose hair was like the corn, and rippling seas
Of new-sprung grasses where the light winds run!
O thou, whose breath was music, and whose mirth
Ran like bright water o’er the thirsting earth.
Surely now where the frail, dim shadows dwell
Thou hast sown all the marvel of Earth’s flowers
And lit with wonder all the ways of Hell
And winged the feet of their slow-footed hours,
While I sit lonely by the water-springs
On the bare earth where not one linnet sings!