III “HELEN, your letter, proving, I suppose, That you exist somewhere in space, who knows? Somewhere in time, perhaps, arrives this morning, Reminding me with a note of Lutheran warning That faith’s the test, not works. Works!—any fool Can do them if he tries to; but what school Can teach one to credit the ridiculous, The palpably non-existent? So with us, Votaries of the copulative cult, In this affair of love, _quicumque vult_, Whoever would be saved, must love without Adjunct of sense or reason, must not doubt Although the deity be far removed, Remote, invisible; who is not loved Best by voluptuous works, but by the faith That lives in absence and the body’s death. I have no faith, and even in love remain Agnostic. Are you here? The fact is plain, Constated by the heavenly vision of you, Maybe by the mouth’s warm touch; and that I love you, I then most surely know, most painfully. But now you’ve robbed the temple, leaving me A poor invisibility to adore, Now that, alas, you’re vanished, gone . . . no more; You take my drift. I only ask your leave To be a little unfaithful—not to you, My dear, to whom I was and will be true, But to your absence. Hence no cause to grieve; For absence may be cheated of a kiss— Lightly and laughing—with no prejudice To the so longed-for presence, which some day Will crown the presence of Le Vostre J. (As dear unhappy Troilus would say).” IV OH, the maggots, the maggots in his brains! Words, words and words. A birth of rhymes and the strangest, The most unlikely superfœtations— New deep thoughts begot by a jingle upon a pun, New worlds glimpsed through the window of a word That has ceased, somehow, to be opaque. All the muses buzzing in his head. Autobiography crystallised under his pen, thus: “When I was young enough not to know youth, I was a Faun whose loves were Byzantine Among stiff trees. Before me naked Truth Creaked on her intellectual legs, divine In being inhuman, and was never caught By all my speed; for she could outrun thought. Now I am old enough to know I am young, I chase more plastic beauties, but inspire Life in their clay, purity in their dung With the creative breath of my desire. And utter truth is now made manifest When on a certain sleeping face and breast