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 with red asterias. Is it sin
If I have cast lover and friend aside,
     Scorning them as myself who cannot win
The strengths of beauty, the heavenly altitudes?—
     O sad and sacred Spirit of Disdain,
What penances upon thine ivory roods
     Within the burning Castles of thy pain!—
Thy mystic will no motion ever knew
     Outwith the splendid danger of extremes;
Thy sorrowful refusals pass thee through
     The great concentrics of star-builded dreams,
Unto the crypt of absolute ecstasy,
To God or Nothing—where thine heart would be.

XLII

SPELL-BOUND

I have been frozen. Once I was not cold.
     But I have strayed within some glittering
Night Of Lapland miracle, have leagued of old
     With glaives and banners of wild Polar light.
Yet if I could dissolve in tears this core
     Of ice, my heart, undo these crystal spells,
We should be sisters of incense evermore
     Like the crowned Lover of the Canticles.
Through the great honeycomb of my soul should steep
     The secrets of the lilies, and her fire
Be ambergris, her agate flagons keep
     The sorcelled hydromel which brings Desire
To that mysterious Dark where still prevails
The dream of roses and of nightingales.

XLIII

THE NIGHT OBSCURE OF THE SOUL

When the Soul travails in her Night Obscure,
     The nadir of her desperate defeat,
What heavenly dream shall help her to endure,
     What flaming Wisdom be her Paraclete?
No curious Metaphysic can withhold
     The heart from that mandragora she craves:—
Unreasonable, old as Earth is old,
     The blind ecstatic miracle that saves.
Far off the pagan trumpeters of Pride
     Call to the blood.—Love moans.—Some fiery fashion
Of rapture like the anguish of the bride
     Leaps from the dark perfection of the Passion,
Crying: "O beautiful God, still torture me,
For if thou slay me, I will trust in Thee."

XLIV

THE CONQUEST OF IMMORTALITY

Ah! not in earthy dull durations I
     Mine heirdom of Eternity implore.
Give one star-drunken moment ere I die,
     Then doom me dreadless to the implacable Door.
That mystical Assumption shall disown
     Time's haughtiest lieges. Grey mortality
Will disenchant the jewel-breded throne
     Of Cassiopeia when more burningly
My deed exults with angels. I will borrow
     From continuity no larva-lease:
Through sworded crises and great compts of sorrow
     I seek the splendour that shall never cease
Though Death coin from my soul through endless years
Dim drachmas of his infinite arrears.

XLV

WOMEN OF TANAGRA

Have these forgotten they are toys of Death
     That in his sad aphelions of desire
They still regret the joy that perisheth,
     And Spring's great reveries that exceed and tire,—
Faintly accusing Love's unmercied yokes
     With almost wanton grace, the craft and art
Of precious frailty that with subtle strokes
     Of sweetness finds the core of Passion's heart?
They carry fans and mirrors, or make fast
     The mournful flute-like cadence of a veil.
Slight fans that winnowed souls, mirrors that glassed
     The burning brooding wings which never fail!
Still in such lovely vanities to-day
The gods their secret wisdom hide away.

XLVI

THE INVENTORY

TO HER FRIEND

I love all sumptuous things and delicate,
     Ethereal matters richly paradised
In Art's proud certitudes. I love the great
     Greek vases, carven ivory, subtilised
Arras of roses, Magians dyed on glass,
     Graven chalcedony and sardonyx,
Nocturnes that through the nerves like fever pass,
     Arthurian kings, Love on the crucifix,
All sweet mysterious verse, the Byzantine
     Gold chambers of Crivelli, marble that flowers
In shy adoring angels, patterned vine
     And lotos, and emblazoned Books of Hours,—
And you, whose smiling eyes to ironies
Reduce both me and mine idolatries.

XLVII

COMFORT

I

I sang the Dolorous Stroke of Disillusion,
     Yet never have I broken faith with Joy:
Flame-broidered trance and starless cold confusion
     Of slain and flying dreams shall not destroy
The radiant oath to that bright Suzerain
     Whose lightning-lovely succour ambushed lies
Even in the most impossible strait of pain.
     Mystical paradox, divine surprise
Of rapture! By intensities alone
     Their spirits enter in to exultation
For whom the burning winds of their sad zone
     Bear down the Dove of the Imagination,
Who suffer superbly, in scarlet violetted,
As the Sacred Kings of the Lillie mourned their dead.*

* See Favine's "Book of Chivalry."

XLVIII

COMFORT

II

And that is marvellous comfort;—and yet poor
     To what mere woman-mystery can give,
The strange simplicity that will endure
     The pangs of death, most resolute to live.
This God of riddles that shaped a thing so frail
     For his worst torment hid mysterious powers
Within her breast who can like lilies prevail
     Through rains of doom that conquer brassy towers.
Her heart lies broken; when some trivial chord
     Of sweetness chimes reveille through the sense,—
A rose, a song, a smile, a courtly word.
     She wakes, and sighs, and softly passes thence
Back to the masquers, though her soul's veiled Pyx
Enclose the solemn fruits of the Crucifix.

XLIX

THE CHANGE

I spun my soul about with soft cocoons
     Of pleasure golden-pale. For me, for me
Were precious things put forth by crescent moons,
     Of pearl and milky jade and ivory.
Grave players on ethereal harpsichords,
     My senses wrought a music exquisite
As patterned roses, all my life's accords
     Were richer, ghostlier than peacocks white.
So in my paradise reserved and fair
     I grew as dreamlike as the Elysian dead;
Until a passing Wizard smote me there,
     And suddenly my soul inherited
Some gorgeous terrible dukedom of desire
Like those in bright Andromeda's realms of fire.

L

AT THE END

The fiery permutations of the soul
     Are infinite, but how to be revealed?
On what impassive matter must the whole
     Inveterate coil of good and ill be sealed!
How much too simple all the tale of deeds
     To pattern out these labyrinthine things,
These knots of bright unreason, ghostly bredes
     Veiled weavers weave, moving with silver wings