Muriel Stuart

    You give no portent of impermanence
    Though before sun goes you are long gone hence,
    Your bright, inherited crown
    Withered and fallen down.

    It seems that your blue immobility
    Has been for ever, and must for ever be.
    Man seems the unstable thing,
    Fevered and hurrying.

    So free of joy, so prodigal of tears,
    Yet he can hold his fevers seventy years,
    Out-wear sun, rain and frost,
    By which you are soon lost.

    If I have given myself to you and you,
    And if these pale hands are not virginal,
    Nor these bright lips beneath your own lips true,
    What matters it?    I do not stand nor fall
    By your old foolish judgments of desire:
    If this were Helen's way it is not mine;
    I bring you beauty, but no Troys to fire:
    The cup I hold brims not with Borgia's wine.
    You, so soon snared of sudden brows and breasts,
    Lightly you think upon these lips, this hair.
    My thoughts are kinder: you are pity's guests:
    Compassion's bed you share.

    It was not lust delivered me to you;
    I gave my wondering mouth for pity's sake,
    For your strange, sighing lips I did but break
    Many times this bread, and poured this wine anew.
    My bo...

    Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
    Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
    Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry -
    Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

    Dead that shall quicken at the call of Spring,
    Sleepers to stir beneath June's magic kiss,
    Though birds pass over, unremembering,
    And no bee seek here roses that were his.

    In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams
    A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
    That will drink deeply of a century's streams,
    These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

    Here in their safe and simple house of death,
    Sealed in their shells a million roses leap;
    Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
    And in my hand a forest lies asleep.

    The mind is Beauty's thief, the poet takes
    The golden spendthrift's trail among the blooms
    Where she stands tossing silver in the lakes,
    And twisting bright swift threads on airy looms.
    Her ring the poppy snatches, and the rose
    With laughter plunders all her gusty plumes.
    He steals behind her, gathering, as she goes
    Heedless of summer's end certain and soon, -
    Of winter rattling at the door of June.

    When Beauty lies hand-folded, pale and still,
    Forsaken of her lovers and her lords,
    And winter keeps cold watch upon the hill
    Then he lets fall his bale of coloured words.
    At frosty midnight June shall rise in flame,
    Move at his magic with her bells and birds;
    The rose will redden as he speaks her nam...

    I raised the veil, I loosed the bands,
    I took the dead thing from its place.
    Like a warm stream in frozen lands
    My lips went wandering on her face,
            My hands burnt in her hands.

    She could not stay me, being dead;
    Her body here was mine to hold.
    What if her lips had lost their red?
    To me they always tasted cold
            With the cold words she said.

    Did my breath run along her hair,
    And free the pulse, and fire the brain,
    My wild blood wake her wild blood there?
    Her eyelids lifted wide again
            In a blue, sudden stare.

    Beneath my fierce, profane caress
    The whole white length of body moved;
    The drowsy bosom seemed to press
    As if against a breast bel...

    The low bay melts into a ring of silver,
    And slips it on the shore's reluctant finger,
    Though in an hour the tide will turn, will tremble,
    Forsaking her because the moon persuades him.
    But the black wood that leans and sighs above her
    No hour can change, no moon can slave nor summon.
    Then comes the dark; on sleepy, shell-strewn beaches,
    O'er long, pale leagues of sand, and cold, clear water
    She hears the tide go out towards the moonlight.
    The wood still leans ... weeping she turns to seek him,
    And his black hair all night is on her bosom.

    Between two common days this day was hung
    When Love went to the ending that was his;
    His seamless robe was rent, his brow was wrung,
    He took at last the sponge's bitter kiss.

    A simple day the dawn had watched unfold
    Before the night had borne the death of love;
    You took the bread I blessed, and love was sold
    Upon your lips, and paid the price thereof.

    I changed then, as when soul from body slips,
    And casts its passion and its pain aside;
    I pledged you with most spiritual lips,
    And gave you hands that you had crucified.
    You who betrayed, kissed, crucified, forgot,
    You walked with Christ, poor fool, and knew it not!

Is it not a wonderful thing to be able to force an astonished plant to bear rare flowers which are foreign to it ... and to obtain a marvellous result from sap which, left to itself, would have produced corollas without beauty? - VIRGIL.


    I stood forlorn and pale,
    Pressed by the cold sand, pinched by the thin grass,
    Last of my race and frail
    Who reigned in beauty once when beauty was,
    Before the rich earth beckoned to the sea,
    Took his salt lips to taste,
    And spread this gradual waste -
    This ruin of flower, this doom of grass and tree.
    Each Spring could scarcely lift
    My brows from the sand drift
    To fill my lips with April as she went,
    Or force my weariness
    To its sad, summer dress:
    On the harsh beach I h...

        Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles! -
        Usumcasane and Theridamas,
        Is it not passing brave to be a king,
        And ride in triumph through Persepolis? - MARLOWE.


    Bring the great words that scourge the thundering line
    With lust and slaughter - words that reek of doom
    And the lost battle and the ruined shrine; -
    Words dire and black as midnight on a tomb;
    Hushed speech of waters on the lip of gloom;
    Huge sounds of death and plunder in the night; -
    Words whose vast plumes above the ages meet,
    Girdling the lost, dark centuries in their flight,
    The slave of their unfetterable feet.

    Bring words as pure as rills of earliest Spring
    In some far cranny of the hillside born
    To stitc...