Strange dancing-girl with curls of golden wire,
With strait white veil, and sinister jewel strung
Upon your brows, your sombre eyes desire
Some secret thing. Garlanded leaves are young
Around your head, and, in your beauty's hours,
Venice yet loved that joy's enthusiast
Be frail, fantastic as gilt iris-flowers.
O startling reveller from out the Past,
Long, long ago through lanes of chrysophrase
The Dark Eros compelled his exquisite
Evil apostle. This painter made your praise,
A piece of art, a curious delight.
But your ghost wanders. Yesterday your sweet
Accusing eyes challenged me in the street.
XVII
THE ENIGMA
Eternally grieving and arraigning eyes,
Why vex my heart? What is it I can do?
Can I call back the hounds of Time with sighs,
Or find inviolate peace to bring you to,
Pluck frenzy from the amazed soul of man,
Or curb the horses of raging poverty
That trample you until—escape who can,—
Or spill the honey from rich revelry
And strip the silken days?—Alas! alas!
I am so dream-locked that I cannot know
Why it is not much easier to pass
To death than let love's haughty cloister show
A common hostel for such taverners.—
Ye know, who are perhaps my ransomers.
XVIII
THE DOUBT
I am pure, because of great illuminations
Of dreamy doctrine caught from poets of old,
Because of delicate imaginations,
Because I am proud, or subtle, or merely cold.
Natheless my soul's bright passions interchange
As the red flames in opal drowse and speak:
In beautiful twilight paths the elusive strange
Phantoms of personality I seek.
If better than the last embraces I
Love the lit riddles of the eyes, the faint
Appeal of merely courteous fingers,—why,
Though 'tis a quest of souls, and I acquaint
My heart with spiritual vanities,—
Is there indeed no bridge twixt me and these?