University of Virginia Library

Beauty and Truth are like a stedfast shore
Bathed in tranquillities of boundless light;
Veiled in the stainless garments of the night,
Gemmed with the glory of eternal stars;
And there, enisled above the reach and roar
And windy wreck of Time's abysmal sea,
Life, like Odysseus worn with works and wars,
Love, like the Nymph Kalypso, half-divine,
Meet and commune, transfuse and intertwine,
Thro' mortal hours of immortality. ...
So has it been for us—as it shall be
Still and hereafter so! But now, once more,—
Now, while the powers of life and love are whole
And perfect to their inmost core,—
Now, one by one and all inexorably
The imperishable hours are spent,
The hours of new, renewed abandonment,
Of life's surrender, soul and sense,
Of love's possession, sense and soul;
And while our spirits yield and yearn,
And while the heart lies naked still
And still the fain, flushed senses thrill,
The swift and ceaseless tides return
To bear life's restless venture hence. ...
Now, therefore—now, Beloved—my Darling, now
While still the golden and transparent glow
Of the inextinguishable desire
Colours thy pale and perfumed loveliness,—
Now while love's assignation still is sweet
In the high, bridal mansions of the heart,—
Veiled and voluptuous and discreet,
With eyes still open to their depths of fire,
Still rash, still languid with love's long caress,
Once more, with me, Beloved, rise up, depart!—
Once more,
Pass from the shadowed door! ...

Winged with the Spirit; robed in light and song
Born of the purest ecstasies which throng
The unutterable heart transfused with love;
Let us return, transfigured from above,
As thro' love's lingering sunset's golden haze
To life's familiar, tried and transient ways. ...
Let us, as many a time before,
Together, while the great lights wane,
Traverse the sombre corridor,
And by the steep, dark, silent stair
Descend together from the secret room
Where, thinly, in the perfumed air,
Pale thro' the curtained window-pane,
The veiled light falls along the breathing bed. ...
While quietly overhead
Round the low, narrow cornice grows the gloom. ...
Let us return! This hour of life is dead:
Love and the Truth's eternities remain!
Hither and hence the ways of love are sane,
Splendid and sane and secret to the end!
Therefore with Love, as freely with a friend,
Hence from the heart's invincible regency,
From sanctuary,
From this clear Eden, this sequestered place,
The breathless, long desire, the brief embrace,
The eyes that lighten and the lips that burn,
Let us return! ...

Life sounds its thunder-call!—
Fearless, Beloved, as lovers let us go,
Radiant with love's resplendent after-glow,
Down from the garden and the festival;
Down from the pleasaunce and the shadowed wall;
Down from the vineyard by the shining shore;
Down to the storm-swept stream of life once more!
Come!—for our lives shall not be less,
Since Love goes with us side by side,
Borne forth on Time's tremendous tide,
Than in this Paradise of love's excess
And incommunicable happiness. ...
Therefore, receptive, ardent, bold,
Let us go down, go forth, and fare:
As, garmented in sunset-gold,
Winged with the midnight's moonless air,
Hazardous men go down in ships
To the inhospitable seas. ...
Swift and responsive on our lips,
Life's large hilarities resound;
Clear in our eyes and hearts abound
The light no loveless vision sees,
The joy no loveless heart can share;
And, in the rumouring street below,
Life's human currents rise and flow—
Whither or whence we neither know nor care!
Only our hearts rejoice as now we go—
Lovers, alone, together—down,
This first of nightfall, to the sleepless town,
The streaming thoroughfare! ...
O my Beloved, how sweet it is,
How dear and human, strange and sweet,
Free and afoot a night like this,
To wander forth; to feel again
The mighty murmur and multitude of men;
To see, in fire and smoke, the street,
Strident as Hell's remorseless gorge,
Furious with faces, disappear
Between the endless lamps alight,
Into the sunset flaming like a forge!—
While, interfused with the gold atmosphere,
Quietly falls, this end of afternoon,
The grey, great shadow of night,
Whereunder shines the round, red, murky moon,
Like a low lantern, watchful and withheld
Under the cloak of a conspirator ...
The street is like a flaring corridor
In some fantastic, harlot's house of song
And wine and women and wantonness and wrong! ...
And sweet it is to understand
The rash desire, the thrilled delight,
And by the restless charm compelled
To feel our eager lives impelled
With life's strong stream, and hand in hand
To wander in the lessening light. ...
O sweet it is, O wild and sweet,
To feel the young heart's vagrancies
Resume dominion!—while the night comes down,
Dressed in her smoke-begrimed, star-spangled gown,
Like a procuress, witching, old and wise:
The silent, sinister, discreet
Accomplice of the brawling, bawdy street,
Who shelters and secludes from sight
The dreams, desires and deeds that shrink from light—
Exquisite, rash, lascivious privacies;
The eyes of lust, the virgin's startled eyes;
The assassin's knife, the victim's broken breath;
The pain of poverty, disease and death;—
The heart's supreme, inviolate secrecies! ...
Yea, Love—how free, how intimate, how sweet,
How vagrant and voluptuous, arm in arm,
At dark to wander in the city street!—
As lovers whose desires fulfil
Of life and love the secret will,
To pass, to pause, to swiftly lean
In shadowed porticoes, to kiss
With wilful lips, abandoned, eager, warm;
With eyes unseeing and hands that clasp unseen;—
To share our secret, and because of this
Feel our two lives miraculously one,
Our hearts disclosed in rapt communion! ...
O Love, how sweet to fold our solitude
About us like a mantle, and pass on
Loved and companioned thro' the multitude! ...
How sweet to have no heed or care
Whither we go or whence we come,
Since truth is ours to do and dare,
And all the labyrinthine ways
Of human life are the soul's thoroughfare,
And all the spacious nights and flowing days
Are as pavilions where the heart goes home
To love—the perfect love we share!
The soul is here, the soul is there;
Hither or hence the heart is fain;
The truth is hard and high and sane
In every time and everywhere:
And we as lovers well may feel
The lustrous eyes of love reveal
The free, unutterable, just
And secret spiritual trust
That truth is possible, that we
Shall yet be perfect as we must!
Love dares not dream of less than this;
No less can life believe or be;
The smiles and frowns of Lachesis,
Who sits with fortune on her knee,
Are to the spirit vain and vile.
For always, when and where, we are,—
Here in the street where mile on mile,
In hope and fear, the captives press;
There in the sacred, secret room
Where life is love's and loveliness,—
The human soul's transcendent doom
Is ours alone to make or mar!
Ourselves are all, and all we know:
And therefore, strictly as the cost
Of life to us is high or low,
The game is won, the game is lost;
Since always by how much we give
Of life and love and thought and power and faith,
By so much and no less we love and live,
Find and possess the soul,
And, reassured of life, confront the goal,
Fearful of no betrayal after death. ...
Darling—the street is endless ... and the night
Eternal ... and the sacred, secret room
Is always furnished in the heart and fair!—
Love's bridal chamber is adorned, and there
The Paranymph, arrayed in golden light,
Waits for the Bridegroom in the quiet gloom. ...
Still in the bridal chamber—still alone,
The Bridegroom and the Paranymph—with love,
With life and love together:—even so
Let us begone!—and we are gone, and go
Into the street ... into the night ...
Where the stars rise and life's dark waters flow ...
Where, gyre on gyre and row on row,
Shine, inextinguishably bright,
The lamps that Truth, the eternal Lamplighter,
Kindles above
The brawling, bawdy street of life,
To guide the spiritual Wayfarer ...
Lovers we are! As lovers going home,—
Home to the heart with love's high secret rife;
Home to the spirit's thrilled eternity;—
Come, let us go! The best is ours to be!
Body and soul together, Darling, come! ...