How can we find? how can we rest? how can We, being gods, win joy, or peace, being man? We, the gaunt zanies of a witless Fate, Who love the unloving, and the lover hate, Forget the moment ere the moment slips, Kiss with blind lips that seek beyond the lips, Who want, and know not what we want, and cry With crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by. Love’s for completeness! No perfection grows ’Twixt leg, and arm, elbow, and ear, and nose, And joint, and socket; but unsatisfied Sprawling desires, shapeless, perverse, denied. Finger with finger wreathes; we love, and gape, Fantastic shape to mazed fantastic shape, Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed, Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lost By crescive paths and strange protuberant ways From sanity and from wholeness and from grace. How can love triumph, how can solace be, Where fever turns toward fever, knee toward knee? Could we but fill to harmony, and dwell Simple as our thought and as perfectible, Rise disentangled from humanity Strange whole and new into simplicity, Grow to a radiant round love, and bear Unfluctuant passion for some perfect sphere, Love moon to moon unquestioning, and be Like the star Lunisequa, steadfastly Following the round clear orb of her delight, Patiently ever, through the eternal night! *Town and Country* Here, where love’s stuff is body, arm and side Are stabbing-sweet ’gainst chair and lamp and wall. In every touch more intimate meanings hide; And flaming brains are the white heart of all Here, million pulses to one centre beat: Closed in by men’s vast friendliness, alone, Two can be drunk with solitude, and meet On the sheer point where sense with knowing’s one. Here the green-purple clanging royal night, And the straight lines and silent walls of town, And roar, and glare, and dust, and myriad white Undying passers, pinnacle and crown Intensest heavens between close-lying faces By the lamp’s airless fierce ecstatic fire; And we’ve found love in little hidden places, Under great shades, between the mist and mire. Stay! though the woods are quiet, and you’ve heard Night creep along the hedges. Never go Where tangled foliage shrouds the crying bird, And the remote winds sigh, and waters flow! Lest—as our words fall dumb on windless noons, Or hearts grow hushed and solitary, beneath Unheeding stars and unfamiliar moons, Or boughs bend over, close and quiet as death,— Unconscious and unpassionate and still, Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, And gradually along the stranger hill Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air,