THE FIVE KISSES gI
Through silken curtains that bedeck the bed. | A| swifl white arrow at some recreant
Lift up thine head ! star.
For night is here, a dragon, to devour
The slow sweet hour
Filled with all smoke of incense, and the
praise
More loud than day’s
That swings its barren censer in the sky
And asks to die
Because the sea will hear no hollow moan
Beyond its own,
Because the sea that kissed dead Sappho!
sings
Of strange dark things—
Shapes of bright breasts that purple as the
sun
Grows dark and dun,
Of pallid lips more haggard for the kiss
Of Salmacis,?
Of eager eyes that startle for the fear
Too dimly dear
Lest there come death, like passion, and
fulfil
Their dreams of ill!
Oh! lift thy forehead to the night’s cool
wind !
The meekest hind
That fears the noonday in her grove is bold
To seek the gold
So pale and perfect as the moon puts on:
The light is gone.
Hardly as yet one sees the crescent maid
Move, half afraid,
Into the swarthy forest of the air
And, breast made bare,
Gather her limbs about her for the chase
Through starry space,
And, while the lilies sway their heads, to
bend
Her bow, to send
1 Sappho, the great lyric poet of Greece,
plunged from a rock into the sea, according
to later tradition.
2 A stream into which a man plunged, and
was united, as a Hermaphrodite, with its
attendant nymph. ‘The reference is connected
with Sappho’s loves. See her Ode to Aphrodite
and Swinburne’s Anactoria and Hermaphro-
ditus.
The sea is far
Dropped in the hollows of the swooning
land.
Oh! hold my hand!
Lift up thy deep eyes to my face, and let
Our lips forget
The dumb dead hours before they met to-
gether !
The snowbright weather
Calls us beyond the grassy downs, to be
Beside the sea,
The slowly-breathing ocean of the south.
Oh, make thy mouth
A rosy flame like that most perfect star
Whose kisses are
So red and ripe! Oh, let thy limbs entwine
Like love with mine!
Oh, bend thy gracious body to my breast
To sleep, to rest !
But chiefly let thine eyes be set on me,
As when the sea
Lay like a mirror to reflect the shape
Of yonder cape
Where Sappho stood and touched the lips
of death !
Thy subtle breath
Shall flow like incense in between our cheeks,
Where pleasure seeks
In vain a wiser happiness. And so
Our whispers low
Shall dim the utmost beauty of thy gaze
Through moveless days
And long nights equable with
pleasure :
So love at leisure
Shall make his model of our clinging looks,
And burn his books
To write a new sweet volume deeper much,
And frail to touch,
Being the mirror of a gossamer
Too soft and fair.
is the hour when all the world is
sleeping ;
The winds are keeping
A lulling music on the frosty sea.
The air is free,
trancéd
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