"Oh, I was born for women, women, women. Through my still boyhood rang the first alarm; And since that terror ever fresh invaders Have occupied and sacked me to their harm. I am the cockpit where endemic fever Holds the low country in a broken lease From waves that ruined dykes appear to welcome. Only one great emotion spares me--Peace! "I have grown up for women, women, women; And suffering has had her fill of me. My ears still echo with receding laughter, As shells retain the voices of the sea. I am the gateway only, not the garden, That opens from a crowded thoroughfare. I stand ajar to every passing fancy, And all have knocked, but none have rested there. "And I shall die for women, women, women, But not for love of them. Adventure calls Or waits with old romance to disappoint me Behind the promise of surrendered walls. I am the vessel of some mad explorer, That sails to seek for treasure in strange lands Without a steersman in a crew of gallants, And, finding fortune, ends with empty hands." A deathly silence fell. Green-turbaned men Fell noiselessly to sharpening their knives On their bare hardened feet. Seyid Rida sighed: "Alas, your heart is set upon reward For gifts of self. You cannot understand Love loves for nothing, brother. Those who serve God the most purely cannot count that He Will love them in return...." The Wazir scowled. But Dreamer-of-the-Age took him aside, "I would unfold a story like a carpet. The camel Tous told it to me last night: "King Suleiman's wives were as jewels, his jewels as stones of the desert In number. His concubines herded as desert-gazelles in their grace, That answered his bidding as meekly as all his wild animal kingdom, The beasts and the birds and the fishes. Yet the world was as pitch on his face. "Now it chanced that the ruler of Saba had news by a merchant of peacocks From this king like a hawk-god of Egypt, whose beak was set deep in the gloom Of his grape-purple beard, and she said: 'We shall see how his vanities stead him When from under the arch of his eyebrows he sees my feet enter his room.'