But these recoil in riddles and reserves.—
The dream's untuned. Ah! vanished chords thereof!
Ah! keen divisions of the jangled nerves
That strung so long the gracious lutes of love!—
Hurry to sell old magian Lamps for new,
Though beauty's moonlike domes dissolve and pass:
If all things change, ye would be changing too,
Crazed hearts that know not your desire, alas!
Still, through these wintry treasons that forswear
The lovely bitter bondage of our god,
Rare perennations of the soul prepare—
And Music yet shall seal the period
With some new star,—with sad pure hands unveil
For ransomed eyes again the gilded Grail.
XLI
THE VIRTUE OF PRIDE
My troubled bosom shall be cinct with pride,
Girdled with red asterias. Is it sin
If I have cast lover and friend aside,
Scorning them as myself who cannot win
The strengths of beauty, the heavenly altitudes?—
O sad and sacred Spirit of Disdain,
What penances upon thine ivory roods
Within the burning Castles of thy pain!—
Thy mystic will no motion ever knew
Outwith the splendid danger of extremes;
Thy sorrowful refusals pass thee through
The great concentrics of star-builded dreams,
Unto the crypt of absolute ecstasy,
To God or Nothing—where thine heart would be.
XLII
SPELL-BOUND
I have been frozen. Once I was not cold.
But I have strayed within some glittering
Night Of Lapland miracle, have leagued of old
With glaives and banners of wild Polar light.
Yet if I could dissolve in tears this core
Of ice, my heart, undo these crystal spells,
We should be sisters of incense evermore
Like the crowned Lover of the Canticles.
Through the great honeycomb of my soul should steep
The secrets of the lilies, and her fire
Be ambergris, her agate flagons keep
The sorcelled hydromel which brings Desire
To that mysterious Dark where still prevails
The dream of roses and of nightingales.