Mistress and maiden and mother, immutable mutable soul!
Love, shalt thou turn to another? Surely I give thee the whole!
Light, shalt thou flicker or darken? Thou and thy lover are met.
Bend from thy heaven and harken! Life, shalt thou fade or forget?
Surely my songs are gone down as leaves in the dark that are blown;
Surely the laurel and crown have faded and left me alone.
Vainly I cry in the sunlight; moon pities my passion in vain.
Dark to my eyes is the one light, aching in bosom and brain.
Surely, O Mother, thou knowest! Have I not followed the star?
I have gone whither thou goest, bitterly followed afar,
Buried my heart in thy sorrow, cast down my soul at thy knees.
Thou, thou hast left me no morrow. Days and desires, what are these?
Nay, I have torn from my breast passion and love and despair:
Sought in thy palaces rest, sleep that awaited me there;
Sleep that awaits me in vain: I have done with the hope of things;
Passion and pleasure and pain have stung me and lost their stings.
Only abides there a hollow, void as the hearth of the earth.
Echo b
may find it and follow, dead from the day of her birth.
Life, of itself not insatiate; death, not presuming to be;
Share me intense and emaciate, waste me, are nothing to me.
Still in the desolate place, still in the bosom that was
Even as a veil for thy face, thy face in a breathed-on glass,
Hangs there a vulture, and tears with a beak of iron and fire.
I know not his name, for he wears no feathers of my desire.
It is thou, it is thou, lobe maiden! My hearth is a bird that flies
Far into the azure laden with love-songs and cries.
O Goddess of Nature and Love! Thyself is the lover I see.
But thou art in the above, and thy kiss is not for me.
Thou art all too far for my kiss; thou art hidden past my prayer.
Thy wing too wide, and the bliss too sweet for me to share.
Thou art Nature and God! I am broken in the wheelings of thy car;
Thy love-song unheard or unspoken, and I cannot see thy star.
Thou art not cold, but bitter is thy burning cry to me.
My tiny heart were fitter for a mortal than for thee.
But I cast away the mortal, and I choose the tortured way,
And I stand before thy portal, and my face is cold and grey.
Thou lovest me with a love more terrible than death;
But thou art in the above, and my wings feel no wind's breath.
Thou art all too fierce and calm, too bitter and sweet, alas!
Thou weavest a cruel charm on my soul that is as glass.
I know thee not, who art naked; I lie beneath thy feet
Who hast called till my spirit achèd with a pang too deathly sweet.
Thou hast given thee to me dying, and made thy bed to me.
I shiver, I shrink, and, sighing, lament it cannot be.
I have no limbs as a God's to close thee in and hold:
Too brief are my periods, and my hours are barren of gold.
I am not thewed a
as Jove to kill thee in one caress!
Not a golden shower is my love, but a child's tear of distress.
Give me the strength of a panther, the tiger's strenuous b
sides,
The lion's limbs that span there some thrice the turn of the tides,
The mutinous frame, the terror of the royal Minotaur, c
That our loves may make a mirror of the dreadful soul of war!
For love is an equal soul, and shares an equal breath.
I am nought - and thou the whole? It were not love, but Death.
Give my thy life and strength, let us struggle for mastery,
As the long shore's rugged length that battles with the sea.
I am thine, I am thine indeed! My form is vaster grown,
And our limbs and lips shall bleed on the starry solar throne.
My life is made as thine; my blessing and thy curse
Beget, as foam on wine, a different universe.
I foam and live and leap: thou laughest, fightest, diest!
In agony swift as sleep thou hangest as the Christ.
My nails are in thy flesh; my sweat is on thy brow;
We are one, we are made afresh, we are Love and Nature now.
I am swifter than the wind: I am wider than the sea:
I am one with all mankind: and the earth is made as we.
The stars are spangles bright on the canopy a
of our bed,
And the sun is a veil of light for my lover's golden head.
O Goddess, maiden, and wife! Is the marriage bed in vain?
Shall my heart and soul and life shrink back to themselves again?
Be thou my one desire, my soul in day as in night!
My mind the home of the Higher! My hearth the centre of Light!