Lilies were on his cheeks and roses too.
His eyes were sad in joy sometimes. He said
Oft in his close abandonments, that woo
Love to be more love than love can be, «Kiss
My eyelids till my closed eyes seem to guess
The kiss they feel laid in my heart's breast-bed.»

O Hadrian, what shall now thy cold life be?
What boots it to be emperor over all?
His absence o'er thy visible empery
Throws a dim pall.
Now are thy nights widowed of love and kisses,
Now are thy days robbed of the night's awaiting,
Now are thy lips purposeless and thy blisses
No longer of the size of thy life, mating
Thy empire with thy love's bold tendernesses.

Now are thy doors closed upon beauty and joy.
Throw ashes on thy head!
Lo, lift thine eyes and see the lovely boy!
Naked he lies upon that memoried bed;
By thine own hand he lies uncovered.
There was he wont thy dangling sense to cloy,
And uncloy with more cloying, and annoy
With newer uncloying till thy senses bled.

His hand and mouth knew gamuts musical
Of vices thy worn spine was hurt to follow.
Sometimes it seemed to thee that all was hollow
In sense in each new straining of sucked lust.
Then still new crimes of fancy would he call
To thy shaken flesh, and thou wouldst tremble and fall
Back on thy cushions with thy mind's sense hushed.

«Beautiful was my love, yet melancholy.
He had that art, of love's arts most unholy,
Of being lithely sad among lust's rages.
Now the Nile gave him up, the eternal Nile.
Under his wet locks Death's blue paleness wages
Now war upon our pity with sad smile».

Even as he thinks, the lust that is no more
Than a memory of lust revives and takes
His senses by the hand, and his flesh quakes
Till all becomes again what 'twas before.
The dead body on the bed gets up and lives
Along his every nerve ripped up and twanged,
And a love-o'er-wise and invisible hand
At every body-entrance to his lust
Utters caresses which flit off, yet just
Remain enough to bleed his last nerve's strand,
O sweet and cruel Parthian fugitives!

He rises, mad, and looks upon his lover,
That now can love nothing but what none know.
Then his cold lips run all the body over—
His lips that scarce remember their warmth, now
So blent with feeling the death they behold;
And so ice-senseless are his lips that, lo!,
He scarce tastes death from the dead body's cold,
But it seems both are dead or living both
And love is still the Presence and the Mover.
Then his lips cease on the other lips' cold sloth.

But there the wanting breath reminds his lips
That between him and his boy-love the mist
That comes out of the gods has crept. The tips
Of his fingers, still idly tickling, list
To some flesh-response to their purple mood.
But their love-orison is not understood.
The god is dead whose cult was to be kissed!

He lifts his hand up to where heaven should be
And cries on the mute gods to know his pain.
Lo, list!, o divine watchers of our glee
And sorrow!, list!, he will yield up his reign.
He will live in the deserts and be parched
On the hot sands, he will be beggar and slave;
But give again the boy to be arm-reached!
Forego that space ye meant to be his grave!

Take all the female beauties of the earth!
Take all afar and rend them if ye will!
But, by sweet Ganymede, that Jove found worth
And above Hebe did elect to fill
His cup at his high festivals, and spill
His fairer vice wherefrom comes newer birth—,
The clod of female embraces resolve
To dust, o father of