The Hours of Fiammetta | Page 6

her
nectaries
Can only stand within my heart like tears.
O throbbing wounds, rich
tears, and splendour spent,--
Ye are all my spoil, and I am well
content.
XXXIII
REACTION
Give me a chamber paved with emerald
And hung with arras green as evening skies,
Broidered with halcyons,
moons, and heavily thralled
White lilies, cold rare comfort for the eyes.
Of triumph built was
radiant yesterday:
Like an imperial eagle to the sun
My soul bare up her dreams the
glorious way
Through flagrant ordeals august, and won
To burning eyries, till
beneath her wing
Rankled the shaft. Her Archer was abroad;
And hooded with strange
darkness, shuddering
Down pain's dull spiral, sank she on the sod.
Close round, green dusk
of dews! No more we dare
The blue inviolate castles of the air.
XXXIV
THE IDEALIST
For such an one let lovers cry, Alas!

Since passion's leaguer shall break through in vain
To that cold centre
of bright adamas.--
Storm through her being, rapturous spears of pain!
Ye shall not
wound that queen of gracious guile,
The soul that with immortal trance keeps troth:
For Helen is in Egypt
all the while,
Learning great magic from the Wife of Thoth.
Throned white and
high on red-rose porphyry,
And coifed with golden wings, she lifts her eyes
O'er Nile's green
lavers where most sacredly
The Pattern of the myriad Lotos lies,
Unto those clear horizons
jasper-pale
Her heavenly Brethren ride in silver mail.
XXXV
WOMAN AND VISION
Vainly the Vision of Life entreats those eyes
Where stars of glamour mock at revelations.
But singular fiery
moments do surprise
With dreadful or delicious divinations
The whorls of our blue
Labyrinth: the sweet
Blind sense of touch tells like an undersong
Marvellous matters.
What though snared feet,
And wounded hands, and ravelled coils of wrong,
Plead that the
solemn Vision might make whole
Our imperfection?--Fevered second-sight,
Audacious wisdom of the

blinded soul,
Dim delicate auroras of delight
That thrill the Dark from startled
finger-tips,
Are ye less precious an Apocalypse?
XXXVI
ART AND WOMEN
The Triumph of Art compels few womenkind;
And these are yoked like slaves to Eros' car,--
No victors they! Yet
ours the Dream behind,
Who are nearer to the gods than poets are.
For with the silver moons
we wax and wane,
And with the roses love most woundingly,
And, wrought from flower
to fruit with dim rich pain,
The Orchard of the Pomegranates are we.
For with Demeter still we
seek the Spring,
With Dionysos tread the sacred Vine,
Our broken bodies still
imagining
The mournful Mystery of the Bread and Wine.--
And Art, that fierce
confessor of the flowers,
Desires the secret spice of those veiled
hours.
XXXVII
DESTINY
The great religions of the Rose and Grape
Have bound us in to their sad Paradise:
We dream in crucial symbols,
nor escape

The cypress-garden where the slain god lies.
Daughters of
lamentation round the Cross
Where Beauty suffers garlanded with thorn,
Remembrancers through
all the Night of Loss,
We bear the spikenard of the Easter Morn.
The yearning Springs, the
brooding Autumns seethe
Like philtres in our veins. O dark Election,
Are then the sacrificial
doors we wreathe
With lilies fiery gates of Resurrexion?
And does the passion of our
spices feed
Love's bright Arabian miracle indeed?
XXXVIII
CONFLICT
Why should a woman find her dream of love
Irised by the strange ecstasy of Art?
Is not Eros a terrible lord enough
That she must bear both Hunters of the heart,
The Golden Archer and
the Scarlet too?
Then bitter anomalies annul her choir
Of puissant and subtle instincts,
rended through
By gorgeous dualisms of vain-desire.
For Love outrages Art's clear
disciplines,
And Art lures Love to guilt of cryptic treason:
The spirit of
imagination pines,
Captive in webs of exquisite unreason.
Alas for this translated soul of
hers,
The rose's, that must be the garlander's!

XXXIX
PREDECESSORS
Faëry of Sheba, idol moulded in
Onyx milk-white, moon-mailed and casqued with gems;
Ye
gold-swathed queens of Egypt, Isis' kin,
With bright god-hawks and snakes for diadems;
Serene
masque-music of Greek girls that bear
The sacred Veil to that Athenian feast;
Hypatia, casting from thine
ivory chair
The gods' last challenge to the godless priest;
Fantastic fine
Provençals wistfully
Hearkening Love, the mournful lute player;
Diamond ladies of that
Italy
When Art and Wisdom Passion's angels were--
Ye give this grail
(touch with no mad misprision!)
Of Beauty's rose-red miracled
tradition.
XL
TRANSITION
But these recoil in riddles and reserves.--
The dream's untuned. Ah! vanished chords thereof!
Ah! keen
divisions of the jangled nerves
That strung so long the gracious lutes of love!--
Hurry to sell old
magian Lamps for new,
Though beauty's moonlike domes dissolve and pass:
If all things

change, ye would be changing too,
Crazed hearts that know not your desire, alas!
Still, through these
wintry treasons that forswear
The lovely bitter bondage of our god,
Rare perennations of the soul
prepare--
And Music yet shall seal the period
With some new star,--with sad
pure hands unveil
For ransomed eyes again the gilded Grail.
XLI
THE VIRTUE OF PRIDE
My troubled bosom shall be cinct with pride,
Girdled