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…ve, and flap a scornful wing, Seeing our honour stood a citadel. I saw the foolishness of love and saith : “ I am exalted over shame and death, But will not take my fill of death and shame.” For each kiss leaps, a more insistent breath, And adds fresh fuel to the amorous flame, Not quells it—Is not honour but a name ? 42
THE FORTY-FOURTH DAY “ lips, O you The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss A dateless bargain to engrossing death.” Romeo and Juliet. Sleep, O deep splendour of disastrous years, Gone like a star fallen at the fall of night ! Wake, O mute mouth and majesty of light, Made of no sound that even silence hears, But born of strings intangible, of spheres Shaken of love, a mightier music’s might Frailer to sound than dewfall is to sight ! Wake, O sweet soul incorporate of tears ! Or else dream on and let no tears begem Love’s crown of thorns,…
… wan child Waster by earth and sea, Whose kisses were too free, Too swift and wild ; A Maenad’s floating tress Lost in the wilderness Of death’s or my caress, Discrowned, defiled. 4
…enly : let no breath Persuade us we are living and must die ! Better believe eternal kisses flow Under the strong rude current miscalled death, The lotus-river where our bodies lie ! 84
…cause that rolls all landless from Japan. I did not know until I missed it here How beautiful that beauty is to me, That life that bears Death’s sigil traced too clear, Blue lines within the beauty that is man. (I) Line 4 cannot with any certainty be deciphered. 13
…hat ended with a sterile sting The earlier hour whose heart was full of spring ; And the large love grew piteously lean ; Dreadful, like death ; withdrawn and epicene At the mad crisis of the eventful thing. O that such tender fondness like a flower’s Should take such nameless infamy ! That we Should pluck such bitter bloom, rooted in fear, Salt with the scurf of some diseaséd sea, Foul with the curse of God : that we are here, Hating the night’s inexorable hours. 71
…breath— Not heaven nor hell shall break our solemn troth. love you, and shall love you all my life. I love you, and shall love you after death. 95
…ro Movement of love’s desire too strong to know Or care for that it takes its substance of— As if life’s burden were not drear enough Or death’s deliverance not so far and slow. Our bodies almost perish, with one thought Crowned and completed, consecrate and shrined : A perfect temple of fine amber wrought, Whose shrine’s the body and whose lamp the mind. The heart is priest and sacrifice in one ; And, where it sinned or sorrowed, shall atone. 87
She drains our health and builds it up Into her body ; takes our breath, And we—we dream not it is death ! Arm unto arm and eye to eye, Breast to great breast and thigh to thigh, We look, and strain, and laugh, and die. I see the head hovering above To swoop for cruelty or love ; I feel the swollen veins below The knotted throat ; the ebb and flow Of blood, not milk, in breasts of fire ; Of deaths, not fluctuants, of desire ; Of molten lava that abides Deep in the vast volcanic sides ; Deep scars where kisses once bit in Below young mountains t…
…nermost fire ! O tune of my soul that encloses All life, the tempestuous lyre ! O dawn of my dawn that reposes and darts in desire ! And death and its portals are rifted, Life listens our kisses that weep ; Love hears, and his measure is shifted, Grows solemn and deadly and deep ; Love’s ship droops its sails and is drifted in silence to sleep. 51
Society. What uncouth bypaths of human ex- perience, across what mapless tracks beyond the social pale, must have led hither—hither to death in this Anglo-Saxon-blasted corner of Japan, here, at the very outpost of the East. He spoke my thought. “ Here I lie,” he said, “ east of all things. All my life I have been travelling eastward, and now there is now no further east to go.” “ There is America,” I said. I had to say something. “ Where the disappearance of man has followed that of manners : the exit of God has not wished to lag behind that o…
… the disentangled doom ” He paused, sighing, then continued— “ To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite ; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night ; To defy power which seems omnipotent ; To love, and bear ; to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent : This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great, and joyous, beautiful, and free : This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.” The last phrase pealed trumpet-wise : he sank back into thought. “ Yes,” he said slowly,…
…ght nor sound shall war against him more, For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, All waters as the shore.” NOTE.—The sudden and tragic death of the Editor has necessitated the completion of his task by another hand. The introduction was, however, in practically its present form. xii
…hose his love deliberately, I am quite sure, with reference to his art alone. But if our Editor’s conjecture as to the real cause of his death is right, the fire he played with burnt him at last, and he died of the love he had invoked in play. It is the old-story of the magician strangled by the devil. As to what became of Alice we have no idea, if, indeed, she be after all a real person. In my judgment our poet was perfectly capable of deify- ing an old woman of fifty with a false front and *The results of a lengthy correspondence with some wh…