New Poems | Page 6

and mark!?Borne within thy radiant ark,?While the Earth, a joyous David,?Dances before thee from the dawn to dark.?The moon, O leave, pale ruined Eve;?Behold her fair and greater daughter {1}?Offers to thee her fruitful water,?Which at thy first white Ave shall conceive!?Thy gazes do on simple her?Desirable allures confer;?What happy comelinesses rise?Beneath thy beautifying eyes!?Who was, indeed, at first a maid?Such as, with sighs, misgives she is not fair,?And secret views herself afraid,?Till flatteries sweet provoke the charms they swear:?Yea, thy gazes, blissful lover,?Make the beauties they discover!?What dainty guiles and treacheries caught?From artful prompting of love's artless thought?Her lowly loveliness teach her to adorn,?When thy plumes shiver against the conscious gates of morn!
And so the love which is thy dower,?Earth, though her first-frightened breast?Against the exigent boon protest,?(For she, poor maid, of her own power?Has nothing in herself, not even love,?But an unwitting void thereof),?Gives back to thee in sanctities of flower;?And holy odours do her bosom invest,?That sweeter grows for being prest:?Though dear recoil, the tremorous nurse of joy,?From thine embrace still startles coy,?Till Phosphor lead, at thy returning hour,?The laughing captive from the wishing West.
Nor the majestic heavens less?Thy formidable sweets approve,?Thy dreads and thy delights confess,?That do draw, and that remove.?Thou as a lion roar'st, O Sun,?Upon thy satellites' vex-ed heels;?Before thy terrible hunt thy planets run;?Each in his frighted orbit wheels,?Each flies through inassuageable chase,?Since the hunt o' the world begun,?The puissant approaches of thy face,?And yet thy radiant leash he feels.?Since the hunt o' the world begun,?Lashed with terror, leashed with longing,?The mighty course is ever run;?Pricked with terror, leashed with longing,?Thy rein they love, and thy rebuke they shun.?Since the hunt o' the world began,?With love that trembleth, fear that loveth,?Thou join'st the woman to the man;?And Life with Death?In obscure nuptials moveth,?Commingling alien, yet affin-ed breath.
Thou art the incarnated Light?Whose Sire is aboriginal, and beyond?Death and resurgence of our day and night;?From him is thy vicegerent wand?With double potence of the black and white.?Giver of Love, and Beauty, and Desire,?The terror, and the loveliness, and purging,?The deathfulness and lifefulness of fire!?Samson's riddling meanings merging?In thy twofold sceptre meet:?Out of thy minatory might,?Burning Lion, burning Lion,?Comes the honey of all sweet,?And out of thee, the eater, comes forth meat.?And though, by thine alternate breath,?Every kiss thou dost inspire?Echoeth?Back from the windy vaultages of death;?Yet thy clear warranty above?Augurs the wings of death too must?Occult reverberations stir of love?Crescent and life incredible;?That even the kisses of the just?Go down not unresurgent to the dust.?Yea, not a kiss which I have given,?But shall tri-umph upon my lips in heaven,?Or cling a shameful fungus there in hell.?Know'st thou me not, O Sun? Yea, well?Thou know'st the ancient miracle,?The children know'st of Zeus and May;?And still thou teachest them, O splendent Brother,?To incarnate, the antique way,?The truth which is their heritage from their Sire?In sweet disguise of flesh from their sweet Mother.?My fingers thou hast taught to con?Thy flame-chorded psalterion,?Till I can translate into mortal wire--?Till I can translate passing well--?The heavenly harping harmony,?Melodious, sealed, inaudible,?Which makes the dulcet psalter of the world's desire.?Thou whisperest in the Moon's white ear,?And she does whisper into mine,--?By night together, I and she--?With her virgin voice divine,?The things I cannot half so sweetly tell?As she can sweetly speak, I sweetly hear.
By her, the Woman, does Earth live, O Lord,?Yet she for Earth, and both in thee.?Light out of Light!?Resplendent and prevailing Word?Of the Unheard!?Not unto thee, great Image, not to thee?Did the wise heathen bend an idle knee;?And in an age of faith grown frore?If I too shall adore,?Be it accounted unto me?A bright sciential idolatry!?God has given thee visible thunders?To utter thine apocalypse of wonders;?And what want I of prophecy,?That at the sounding from thy station?Of thy flagrant trumpet, see?The seals that melt, the open revelation??Or who a God-persuading angel needs,?That only heeds?The rhetoric of thy burning deeds??Which but to sing, if it may be,?In worship-warranting moiety,?So I would win?In such a song as hath within?A smouldering core of mystery,?Brimm-ed with nimbler meanings up?Than hasty Gideons in their hands may sup;--?Lo, my suit pleads?That thou, Isaian coal of fire,?Touch from yon altar my poor mouth's desire,?And the relucent song take for thy sacred meeds.
To thine own shape?Thou round'st the chrysolite of the grape,?Bind'st thy gold lightnings in his veins;?Thou storest the white garners of the rains.?Destroyer and preserver, thou?Who medicinest sickness, and to health?Art the unthank-ed marrow of its wealth;?To those apparent sovereignties we bow?And bright appurtenances of thy brow!?Thy proper blood dost thou not give,?That Earth, the gusty Maenad, drink and dance??Art thou not life of them that live??Yea, in glad twinkling advent, thou dost dwell?Within our body as a tabernacle!?Thou bittest with thine ordinance?The jaws of Time, and thou dost mete?The unsustainable treading of his feet.?Thou to