Bind up, bind up your dark bright hair
And hide the smouldering sunken fire.
Let it be held no more than fair,
Nor yourself guess how rare, how rare
Its movement, colour and deep fire.
Your eyes they have their consciousness,
Your lips their grave reflective smile,
Your hands their cunning for distress:
Your hair has only beauteousness
And hid flame for its only guile.
That glowing hair on shoulders white
Is pride past sum: take care, take care!
Even to dream of wish'd delight
Too much perturbs the ebb of night--
Bind up, bind up your burning hair!
Yet when I am alone my eyes say, Come.
My hands cannot be still.
In that first moment all my senses ache,
Cells, that were empty fill,
The clay walls shake,
And unimprisoned thought runs where it will.
Runs and is glad and listens and doubts, and glooms
Because you are not here.
Then once more rises and is clear again
As sense is never clear,
And happy, though in vain
These eyes wait and these arms to bring you near.
Yet spite of thought my arms and eyes say, Come,
Pained with such discontent.
For though thought have you all my senses ache--
O, it was not meant
To chase a never-reached mirage
Across the hot, white sand,
And choke and die, while gazing on
Its green and watered strand.
Torture me not with this or that or this,
Love is my master,
you his lesser self;
while you are Love,
I love you generously,
be Eros,
not a tyrannous, bitter mate:
Love has no charm
when Love is swept to earth:
you’d make a lop-winged god,
frozen and contrite,
of god up-darting,
winged for passionate flight.
Withhold your breath !
Heavy in noon, and sleepy as slow death,
Garden of sweets and sours,
The cluster of my body hangs
Odorous with flowers :
Stamen serpent-fangs,
Sultry, in showers.
Withhold your hand !
My boughs are bent with gold, my face is fanned
With wings of bees that, thirsting, curve and kiss ;
Under green leaves, green tendrils coil and hiss ;
Sun spills on me, gloom bears me down too much ;
My heavy fruit will fall without a touch
From hanging long in sultriness like this.
How tender-mad the little meadows lie!
The wobbling lambs are tasting milky weeds,
The tipsy trees
Are leaned like foam on green, wind-gullied seas;
The pale moth flutters where the pale moth leads,
And you, swimming the sky
Waist deep in surf of apple-blossoms — I,
Sweet to your thigh,
Take the new tingle of your froth of seeds.
Hush of night. Perfumed breath of night.
A moth with flaming wings.
Come beloved.
I searched thro' memory's lumber-room
And there I found an old desire,
I took it gently from the gloom
To cherish by my scanty tire.
And all the night a sweet-voiced one,
Sang of the place my loves abide,
Til Earth leaned over from the dawn
And hid the last star in her side.
And often since, when most alone,
I ponder on my old desire,
But never hear the sweet-voiced one,
And there are ruins in my fire.
Green ripples singing down the corn,
With blossoms dumb the path I tread,
And in the music of the morn
One with wild roses on her head.
Now the green ripples turn to gold
And all the paths are loud with rain,
I with desire am growing old
And full of winter pain.
Where sinks deep my love, dead love,
That so warmly glowed awhile?
Where the passion of my dreams
And the kiss of afterwhile?
In the City of Delight,
In the palace built of air,
In the smile of dying Day
And the vision of Despair.
Not where Morning shakes the dew
From the sunshine of her locks ;
Not where Evening breathes her flame
And the moon so gently rocks ;
But where gleams the firefly's wing
In the swamp of dead desire ;
And a fairy shrinks amazed
At the passing of the fire.
Like interpenetrating bells of silver,
The water-drops ring and melt
Into new drops, like new notes
From an untiring lyre,
That in colored succession
Paint our heart-beats
From the gold of sunrise into sunset fire;
Yet, not like that, this brush of water-drops
Limns on the silver rim of Joy
The dark Butterflies of Desire.
Ah! pale cool lips that burn,
Body that yields, though unyielding,
Oh, moon with the heat of the sun!
Flashing out a million lights
To cleave into nothing the endless firmament of my being.
Take all; my soul's mistress! heart's queen,
The flaming fancies of my dream-tortured night
The intoxicating fruits of my day dream,
The fiery lotus of my senses' delight
That rises from the abyss of my life.
The abysmal heaven of love and living
Now bruised, burnt, torn and thrown
To the winds of thy ravishing rejoicing
Whose inarticulate words of delight and moan
Make the ever-yielding music of my soul.