YOU will not lure me with your charms
Or win me back again
Because you held me in your arms
And I forgot my pain.
’Twas not for you my spirit yearned
That night of fierce desire;
The flame in which we met and burned
Drew from an alien fire.
I shall not win my lady’s grace,
Her eyes are still and cold;
I may not find a resting-place
Before my life grows old.
One thought alone rejoicing stirs
And shall, when all is done—
That in your arms my soul met hers
And we became as one.
BASIL BLACKWELL
(MERTON)
AT THE PAUPER ASYLUM
WITH naked turf-plots three by six in symmetric precision spread
You see, between its walls of red, the graveyard of the lunatics.
No cenotaph or obelisk holds memory in graven speech;
Sole epitaph accorded each a number on a painted disk.
In nameless uniformity, with few to know and none to weep,
While space allows, their freehold keep the men that God has made awry.
And these within their straitened fold, who nothing owned, were owned of none,
Possess of all beneath the Sun what God and man could not withhold.