home,
Come, I will consecrate you for the journey.

Rather I had you would not go. Nay come,
I will not again reproach you. Lie back
And let me love you a long time ere you go.
For you are sullen-hearted still, and lack
The will to love me. But even so
I will set a seal upon you from my lip,
Will set a guard of honour at each door,
Seal up each channel out of which might slip
Your love for me.

                 I kiss your mouth. Ah, love,
Could I but seal its ruddy, shining spring
Of passion, parch it up, destroy, remove
Its softly-stirring crimson welling-up
Of kisses! Oh, help me, God! Here at the source
I'd lie for ever drinking and drawing in
Your fountains, as heaven drinks from out their
    course
The floods.

                 I close your ears with kisses
And seal your nostrils; and round your neck you'll
    wear—
Nay, let me work—a delicate chain of kisses.
Like beads they go around, and not one misses
To touch its fellow on either side.

                 And there
Full mid-between the champaign of your breast
I place a great and burning seal of love
Like a dark rose, a mystery of rest
On the slow bubbling of your rhythmic heart.

Nay, I persist, and very faith shall keep
You integral to me. Each door, each mystic port
Of egress from you I will seal and steep
In perfect chrism.
          Now it is done. The mort
Will sound in heaven before it is undone.

But let me finish what I have begun
And shirt you now invulnerable in the mail
Of iron kisses, kisses linked like steel.
Put greaves upon your thighs and knees, and frail
Webbing of steel on your feet. So you shall feel
Ensheathed invulnerable with me, with seven
Great seals upon your outgoings, and woven
Chain of my mystic will wrapped perfectly
Upon you, wrapped in indomitable me.

READING A LETTER

SHE sits on the recreation ground
  Under an oak whose yellow buds dot the pale
     blue sky.
The young grass twinkles in the wind, and the sound
  Of the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy.

So sitting under the knotted canopy
  Of the wind, she is lifted and carried away as in
    a balloon
Across the insensible void, till she stoops to see
  The sandy desert beneath her, the dreary platoon.

She knows the waste all dry beneath her, in one
     place
  Stirring with earth-coloured life, ever turning and
     stirring.
But never the motion has a human face
  Nor sound, save intermittent machinery whirring.

And so again, on the recreation ground
  She alights a stranger, wondering, unused to the
     scene;
Suffering at sight of the children playing around,
  Hurt at the chalk-coloured tulips, and the even-
     ing-green.

TWENTY YEARS AGO

ROUND the house were lilacs and strawberries
  And foal-foots spangling the paths,
And far away on the sand-hills, dewberries
  Caught dust from the sea's long swaths.

Up the wolds the woods were walking,
  And nuts fell out of their hair.
At the gate the nets hung, balking
  The star-lit rush of a hare.

In the autumn fields, the stubble
  Tinkled the music of gleaning.
At a mother's knees, the trouble
  Lost all its meaning.

Yea, what good beginnings
  To this sad end!
Have we had our innings?
  God forfend!

INTIME

RETURNING, I find her just the same,
At just the same old delicate game.

Still she says: "Nay, loose no flame
To lick me up and do me harm!
Be all yourself!—for oh, the charm
Of your heart of fire in which I look!
Oh, better there than in any book
Glow and enact the dramas and dreams
I love for ever!—there it seems
You are lovelier than life itself, till desire
Comes licking through the bars of your lips
And over my face the stray fire slips,
Leaving a burn and an ugly smart
That will have the oil of illusion. Oh, heart
Of fire and beauty, loose no more
Your reptile flames of lust; ah, store
Your passion in the basket of your soul,
Be all yourself, one bonny, burning coal
That stays with steady joy of its own fire.
But do not seek to take me by desire.
Oh, do not seek to thrust on me your fire!
For in the firing all my porcelain
Of flesh does crackle and shiver and break in pain,
My ivory and marble black with stain,
My veil of sensitive mystery rent in twain,
My altars sullied, I, bereft, remain
A priestess execrable, taken in vain—"

                         So the refrain
Sings itself over, and so the game
Re-starts itself wherein I am kept
Like a glowing brazier faintly blue of flame
So that the delicate love-adept
Can warm her hands and invite her soul,
Sprinkling incense and salt of words
And kisses pale, and sipping the toll
Of incense-smoke that rises like birds.

Yet I've forgotten in playing this game,
Things I have known that shall have no name;
Forgetting the place from which I came
I watch her ward away the flame,
Yet warm herself at the fire—then blame
Me that I flicker in the basket;
Me that I glow not with content
To have my substance so subtly spent;
Me that I interrupt her game.
I ought to be proud that she should ask it
Of me to be her fire-opal—.

                         It is well
Since I am here for so short a spell
Not to interrupt her?—Why should I
Break in by making any reply!

TWO WIVES

I

INTO the shadow-white chamber silts the white
Flux of another dawn. The wind that all night
Long has waited restless, suddenly wafts
A whirl like snow from the plum-trees and the pear,
Till petals heaped between the window-shafts
            In a drift die there.

A nurse in white, at the dawning, flower-foamed
   pane
Draws down the blinds, whose shadows scarcely
   stain
The white rugs on the floor, nor the silent bed
That rides the room like a frozen berg, its crest
Finally ridged with the austere line of the dead
            Stretched out at rest.

Less than a year the fourfold feet had pressed
The peaceful floor, when fell the sword on their rest.
Yet soon, too soon, she had him home again
With wounds between them, and suffering like a
   guest
That will not go. Now suddenly going, the pain
            Leaves an empty breast.

II

A tall woman, with her long white gown aflow
As she strode her limbs amongst it, once more
She hastened towards the room. Did she know
As she listened in silence outside the silent door?
Entering, she saw him in outline, raised on a pyre
            Awaiting the fire.

Upraised on