There I stood, holding her farewell hand, (Pressing my life and soul and all The world to one good-bye, till, small And smaller pressed, why there I’d stand Dead when they vanished with the sight of her). And I saw that she had grown aware, Queer puzzled face! of other things Beyond the present and her own young speed, Of yesterday and what new days might breed Monstrously when the future brings A charger with your late-lamented head: Aware of other people’s lives and will, Aware, perhaps, aware even of me.... The joyous hope of it! But still I pitied her; for it was sad to see A goddess shorn of her divinity. In the midst of her speed she had made pause, And doubts with all their threat of claws, Outstripped till now by her unconsciousness, Had seized on her; she was proved mortal now. “Live, only live? For you were meant Never to know a thought’s distress, But a long glad astonishment At the world’s beauty and your own. The pity of you, goddess, grown Perplexed and mortal!” Yet ... yet ... can it be That she is aware, perhaps, even of me? And life recedes, recedes; the curve is bare, My handkerchief flutters blankly in the air; And the question rumbles in the void: Was she aware, was she after all aware? PRIVATE PROPERTY. All fly--yet who is misanthrope?-- The actual men and things that pass Jostling, to wither as the grass So soon: and (be it heaven’s hope, Or poetry’s kaleidoscope, Or love or wine, at feast, at mass) Each owns a paradise of glass Where never a yearning heliotrope Pursues the sun’s ascent or slope; For the sun dreams there, and no time is or was. Like fauns embossed in our domain, We look abroad, and our calm eyes Mark how the goatish gods of pain Revel; and if by grim surprise They break into our paradise, Patient we build its beauty up again. REVELATION. At your mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx, I taste a strange apocalypse: Your subtle taper finger-tips Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks, I know the wiles and each iynx That brought me passionate to your lips: I know you bare as laughter strips Your charnel beauty; yet my spirit drinks Pure knowledge from this tainted well, And now hears voices yet unheard Within it, and without it sees That world of which the poets tell Their vision in the stammered word Of those that wake from piercing ecstasies. MINOAN PORCELAIN. Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze All imperturbable do not Even make pretences to regard The jutting absence of her stays, Where many a Tyrian gallipot Excites desire with spilth of nard. The bistred rims above the fard Of cheeks as red as bergamot Attest that no shamefaced delays Will clog fulfilment, nor retard Full payment of the Cyprian’s praise Down to the last remorseful jot. Hail priestess of we know not what Strange cult of Mycenean days! IN UNCERTAINTY TO A LADY. I am not one of those who sip, Like a quotidian bock, Cheap idylls from a languid lip Prepared to yawn or mock.