And though it be love’s wet blue eyes that cryTo hot love to relinquish its desire,
Still in their depths I see the same red spark
As rose to-night upon us from the dark.
Return
Now I am come again, you who have so desired
My coming, why do you look away from me?
Why does your cheek burn against me—have I inspired
Such anger as sets your mouth unwontedly?
Ah, here I sit while you break the music beneath
Your bow; for broken it is, and hurting to hear:
Cease then from music—does anguish of absence bequeath
Me only aloofness when I would draw near?
The Appeal
You, Helen, who see the stars
As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree,
You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses,
Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me.
Helen, you let my kisses steam
Wasteful into the night’s black nostrils; drink
Me up I pray; oh you who are Night’s Bacchante,
How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink!
Repulsed
The last, silk-floating thought has gone from the dandelion stem,
And the flesh of the stalk holds up for nothing a blank diadem.
The night’s flood-winds have lifted my last desire from me,
And my hollow flesh stands up in the night abandonedly.
As I stand on this hill, with the whitening cave of the city beyond,
Helen, I am despoiled of my pride, and my soul turns fond:
Overhead the nightly heavens like an open, immense eye,
Like a cat’s distended pupil sparkles with sudden stars,
As with thoughts that flash and crackle in uncouth malignancy
They glitter at me, and I fear the fierce snapping of night’s thought-stars.
Beyond me, up the darkness, goes the gush of the lights of two towns,
As the breath which rushes upwards from the nostrils of an immense
Life crouched across the globe, ready, if need be, to pounce
Across the space upon heaven’s high hostile eminence.
All round me, but far away, the night’s twin consciousness roars
With sounds that endlessly swell and sink like the storm of thought in the brain,
Lifting and falling like slow breaths taken, pulsing like oars
Immense that beat the blood of the night down its vein.
The night is immense and awful, Helen, and I am insect small
In the fur of this hill, clung on to the fur of shaggy, black heather.
A palpitant speck in the fur of the night, and afraid of all,
Seeing the world and the sky like creatures hostile together.
And I in the fur of the world, and you a pale fleck from the sky,
How we hate each other to-night, hate, you and I,
As the world of activity hates the dream that goes on on high,
As a man hates the dreaming woman he loves, but who will not reply.
Dream-confused
Is that the moon
At the window so big and red?
No one in the room,
No one near the bed——?
Listen, her shoon
Palpitating down the stair?
—Or a beat of wings at the window there?
A moment ago
She kissed me warm on the mouth,
The very moon in the south
Is warm with a bloody glow,
The moon from far abysses
Signalling those two kisses.
And now the moon
Goes slowly out of the west,
And slowly back in my breast
My kisses are sinking, soon
To leave me at rest.
Corot
The trees rise tall and taller, lifted
On a subtle rush of cool grey flame
That issuing out of the dawn has sifted
The spirit from each leaf’s frame.
For the trailing, leisurely rapture of life
Drifts dimly forward, easily hidden
By bright leaves uttered aloud, and strife
Of shapes
