The Hours of Fiammetta | Page 4

your sombre eyes desire
Some secret thing. Garlanded leaves are young
Around your head,
and, in your beauty's hours,
Venice yet loved that joy's enthusiast
Be frail, fantastic as gilt
iris-flowers.
O startling reveller from out the Past,
Long, long ago through lanes of
chrysophrase
The Dark Eros compelled his exquisite
Evil apostle. This painter
made your praise,
A piece of art, a curious delight.
But your ghost wanders. Yesterday
your sweet
Accusing eyes challenged me in the street.
XVII
THE ENIGMA
Eternally grieving and arraigning eyes,

Why vex my heart? What is it I can do?
Can I call back the hounds of
Time with sighs,
Or find inviolate peace to bring you to,
Pluck frenzy from the amazed
soul of man,
Or curb the horses of raging poverty
That trample you until--escape
who can,--
Or spill the honey from rich revelry
And strip the silken days?--Alas!
alas!
I am so dream-locked that I cannot know
Why it is not much easier to
pass
To death than let love's haughty cloister show
A common hostel for
such taverners.--
Ye know, who are perhaps my ransomers.
XVIII
THE DOUBT
I am pure, because of great illuminations
Of dreamy doctrine caught from poets of old,
Because of delicate
imaginations,
Because I am proud, or subtle, or merely cold.
Natheless my soul's
bright passions interchange
As the red flames in opal drowse and speak:
In beautiful twilight
paths the elusive strange
Phantoms of personality I seek.
If better than the last embraces I
Love the lit riddles of the eyes, the faint
Appeal of merely courteous
fingers,--why,

Though 'tis a quest of souls, and I acquaint
My heart with spiritual
vanities,--
Is there indeed no bridge twixt me and these?
XIX
THE SEEKER
Curious and wistful through your soul I go.
With silver-tinkling feet I penetrate
Sealed chambers, and a puissant
incense throw
Upon the smouldering braziers, love and hate:
And chaunt the
grievèd verses of a dirge
For dying gods, remembering flutes and shawms:
With perverse
moods I trouble you, and urge
The sense to beauty. Give me some sweet alms,
Some reverie, some
pang of a damasked sword,
Some poignant moment yet unparalleled
In my dream-broidered
chronicles, some chord
Of mystery Love's music never knelled
Before;--but nought of the
rough alchemy
That disillusions all felicity.
XX
THE HIDDEN REVERIE
The life of plants, rising through dim sweet states,
Cloisters the rich love-secret more and more,
Gathers it jealously
within the gates
Of the hushed heart; but, mightier than before,
The mystery prevails

and overpowers
Stem, leaf, and petal. So the passion lies
In this tranced flowery being
which is ours
Like to a hidden wound; yet softly dyes
With dolorous beauty all the
stuff of life,
Each dream and vision and desire subduing
With muted pulses, that
great counter-strife
Of soul with its own rhythmic pangs imbuing.
Deny it and disdain it.
Lo! there beat
Red stigmata in heart and hands and feet.
XXI
SOUL AND BODY
It may be all my pain is woven wrong,
And this wild "I" is nothing but a dream
The body exhales, as roses at
evensong
Their passionate odour. Verily it may seem
That this most fevered
and fantastic wear
Of nerves and senses is myself indeed,
The rest, illusion taken in that
snare.--
But still the fiery splendour and the need
Can bite like actual flame
and hunger. Ah!
If Sense, bewildered in the spiral towers
Of Matter, dreamed this
great Superbia
I call the Soul, not less the Dream hath powers;
Not less these Twain,
being one, are separate,
Like lovers whose love is tangled hard with

hate.
XXII
SOUL AND BODY
II
Sometimes the Soul in pure hieratic rule
Is throned (as on some high Abbatial chair
Of moon-pearl and
rose-rubies beautiful)
Within the body grown serene and fair:
Sometimes it weds her like a
lifted rood;
But she endures, and wills no anodyne,
For then she flowers within
the mystic Wood,
And hath her lot with gods--and seems divine:
Sometimes it is her
lonely oubliet,
Sometimes a marriage-chamber sweet with spice:
It is her
triumph-car with flutes beset,
The altar where she lies a sacrifice.--
Cold images! The truth is not in
these.
Both are alive, both quick with rhapsodies.
XXIII
THE JUSTIFICATION
Life I adore, and not Life's accidents.
A garlanded and dream-fast thurifer
My Soul comes out from
beauty's purple tents
That incense-troubled Love may grieve and stir,
Be ransomed from

satiety's sad graves,
And go to God up the bright stair of Wonder.
Since passion makes
immortal Time's tired slaves
I am of those that delicately sunder
Corruptions of contentment from
the breast
As with rare steel. Like music I unveil
Last things, till, weary of
earthen cups and rest,
You seek Montsalvat and the burning Grail.
Ah! blindly, blindly,
wounded with the roses,
I bear my spice where Ecstasy reposes.
XXIV
ASPIRATIONS
Light of great swords, banners all blazoned gold,
Bright lists of danger where with trumpets pass
Riders like those for
whom bride-bells are bold
To beautiful desperate conflict, Michaelmas
Of golden heroes, how
my sad soul saith
Your praise! Nor does to you her love deny,
Solemn