The Collected Works of William Morris :: :: University of Virginia Library

And gilded spires and vanes were borne aloft
From the fair walls by carven turrets high,
And doves and pigeons in their flutterings soft,
With bright unknown birds thereabout did fly,
And from the windows came melodiously
The sound of music that made all things seem
Half dim and fleeting, like a happy dream.

[OMITTED]

Lady Venus, where art thou
We are faint with waiting now,
[OMITTED]
Haply in the northern breeze
Of the hurrying world without,
She is tangled mid the rout
Of Diana, and they go
Ever slower, and more slow,
Careless of the fleeting hart;
Each one thinking for her part
That her summer slips away,
And no hope has she by day,
And no happiness by night.

Or beneath the flickering light
Stands she by some torchlit door,
Where across the rose-strewn floor,
With her trembling, tender feet,
Her unknown delight to meet,

xix

Goes the pale new-wedded bride
Slowly letting her smock glide
To the roses of the floor.

Lo our Queen is at the door
Gold-clad, yet her hair is wet
With the washing of the sea.
O sweet Queen, we kneel to thee.

[OMITTED]

As when from out the green sea first I came
Hidden of nought;...

And in his mind again the ill thought came
That all those things he saw, were but shadows
Set round him but to keep his heart aflame.
The smiling folk, the graceful girls in rows,
His damsel, and the bodies of his foes,
All were but deadly meshes of her net
About his fluttering soul in order set.

[OMITTED]

ere dawn was fully come
She woke, and fell a-longing for the sea,
And the broad yellow sands of her old home,
Where by their black boats fisher people be;
And longed to hear the wind sing mightily
With little changing song from point to point,
And in its waves her body to anoint.

[OMITTED]

Left all alone within this wicked place;
Left naked of her love, and growing old.

Fragments from a later quarto manuscript of “The Hill of Venus.”