Till it burned into your name.
And he set the name in my heart
For an unextinguished fire,
O wild, dark flower of woman,
Deep rose of my desire!
Metrically the poem jars in the line,
And breathed them into your soul,
departing as it does from the general scheme of the third lines, and rendering it necessary to make “soul” bisyllabic in order to carry the metre smoothly, and in accord with its companion verses. “Spirit” would have fitted the metrical exigency better, leaving the final unaccented syllable as in the majority of the lines, but would not have lent itself to repetition in the succeeding line as does “soul,”—so
“who shall arbitrate”? Mr. Roberts rarely offends the ear in his metres, but instead his cadences are notably true.
Aside from the poems upon love, filling the first division of The Book of the Rose it has a miscellaneous group, of which the two that best represent it, to my fancy, are so widely diverse that their mere mention in juxtaposition is amusing; nevertheless they are the lines “To An Omar Punch Bowl,” and the reverent Nativity Song, “When Mary, the Mother, Kissed the Child.” The haunting couplets of the former are by no means of the convivial sort, but the essence of memory and desire, the pathos of this dust that is but “wind that hurries by,”—is in them. However, to be quoted, they need their full context, as does the Nativity Song mentioned.