Ah! Koelue! Had you embalmed your beauty, so It could not backward go Or change in any way, What were the use if on my eyes The embalming spices were not laid To keep us fixed, Two amorous sculptures passioned endlessly? What were the use if my sight grew And its far branches were cloud-hung, You small at the roots like grass; While the new lips my spirit would kiss Were not red lips of flesh, But the huge kiss of power? Where yesterday soft hair through my fingers fell A shaggy mane would entwine; And no slim form work fire to my thighs, But human Life’s inarticulate mass Throb the pulse of a thing Whose mountain flanks awry Beg my mastery—mine! Ah! I will ride the dizzy beast of the world My road—my way. SCENE II.: _Evening before Thebes. The Pyramids are being built. Swarms of Hebrews labouring. Priests and Taskmasters. Two Hebrews are furtively talking._ KOELUE _passes by singing_. KOELUE The vague viols of evening Call all the flower clans To some abysmal swinging And tumult of deep trance; He may hear, flower of my singing, And come hither winging. OLD HEBREW [_Gazing after her in a muffled frenzy._] Hateful harlot! Boils cover your small cruel face. O, fine champion Moses: O, so good to us: O, grand begetter on her of a whip and a torturer, Her father, born to us since you kissed her. Our champion, O so good to us! YOUNG HEBREW For shame! Our brothers’ twisted blood-smeared gums Tell we only have more room for wreck curtailed: For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy Perhaps; but they might mangle your gums Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now; And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril. Be still, old man; wait a little. OLD HEBREW Wait! All day some slow dark quadruped beats To pulp our springiness: All day some hoofed animal treads our veins, Leisurely—leisurely our energies flow out: All agonies created from the first day Have wandered hungry searching the world for us, Or they would perish like disused Behemoth. Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah? YOUNG HEBREW Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood,