Can it be for me Your eyes are brimming, Mother, Even as they smile? Can they be for me, these drops on Your lips so warm? Dear One, do I understand at last! O holy draught, wine of the world, bewildering and bitter-sweet! Sacred tears, from the depths of what wild love welling! Deeper and deeper let me drink and draw-- Nirvana, divine oblivion.... Bitter is the taste of Your lips, Belovèd! * * * * * Though I lie in the darkness, yet often do I remember You--and wonder-- And the touch of Your lips, how strange, and how sad. PROUD DOOM The crucifixion of Beauty on the cross Of mortal destiny--the eternal law-- The thorny crown of death about her brows Fills me with anger--then with sudden awe: So dear, so lovely her adorable sorrow Shows in the darkness, ’mid the tragic doom, The very heart in me leaps up with laughter, And hastens, proud and secret, toward the tomb. THE SECRET ONE Here, by this frame and network of the flesh And wires of her control Surrounded, central in her subtle mesh And secret, sits the soul, Urgent through all the body, while each part Obeys, and all are one-- While in her dungeons labors the lone heart To make her will be done. She reins the forces in their wild career That bear her, as they go, Over the dark abyss; and knows how sheer Reaches the gulf below. How dubious her life and slenderly Hangs, by a scarlet thread, Between eternity and eternity-- She guesses, wise in dread; And ever watchful, ever wary, set In the centre all alone, Feels ’round her cautiously if any threat Be made against the throne. Sometimes along her nerves the voice of pain Bears tidings to her hate And frantic wrath, that the old foe again Is clamorous at the gate-- She rages up and down, and to and fro In timid anger runs: If the frontiers be menaced, it is known All over, and at once. She hears her breast of sorrows night and day At labor; ’round her brood The old oblivions, where she sits at bay; She hears the battling blood. Echoes assail her from far worlds that lie Beyond the bourne of these-- Contact and color and the angry cry Of the realities Beat on the brain forever; the high dream, By stratagem of speech, Enters her portals, where she sits supreme And silent, pondering each: Weighing and challenging, for weal or woe, All rumors, sending out The emissaries of her will, that go To the frontiers about. But most she loves the hour that beauty brings, Of rapture and release From the crude hunger and the cry of things, The hour of her peace-- When, by the inner light that floods her cell, The spirit, even as here, Travails, in secrecy and joy, to tell Her passion and her fear.