Lady, you are my God— Lady, you are my Heaven. _If I am your God Labour for your Heaven._ Lady, you are my God, And shall not love win Heaven? _If love made me God Deeds must win my Heaven._ If my love made you God, What more can I for Heaven? IF YOU ARE FIRE If you are fire and I am fire, Who blows the flame apart So that desire eludes desire Around one central heart? A single root and separate bough, And what blind hands between That make our longing’s mutual glow As if it had not been? IN THE UNDERWORLD I have lived in the underworld so long: How can you, a creature of light, Without terror understand the song And unmoved hear what moves in night? I am a spirit that yours has found, Strange, undelightful, obscure, Created by some other God, and bound In terrible darkness, breathing breath impure. Creature of light and happiness, Deeper the darkness was when you, With your bright terror eddying the distress, Grazed the dark waves and shivering further flew. O, IN A WORLD OF MEN AND WOMEN O, in a world of men and women, Where all things seemed so strange to me, And speech the common world called human For me was a vain mimicry, I thought—O, am I one in sorrow? Or is the world more quick to hide Their pain with raiment that they borrow From pleasure in the house of pride? O joy of mine, O longed-for stranger, How I would greet you if you came: In the world’s joys I’ve been a ranger, In my world sorrow is their name. A GIRL’S THOUGHTS Dim apprehension of a trust Comes over me this quiet hour, As though the silence were a flower, And this, its perfume, dark like dust. My individual self would cling Through fear, through pride, unto its fears: It strives to shut out what it hears, The founts of being murmuring. O! Need, whose hauntings terrorize; Whether my maiden ways would hide, Or lose and to that need subside, Life shrinks and instinct dreads surprise. A BALLAD OF WHITECHAPEL