Why, my heart, do we love her so? (Geraldine, Geraldine!)-- Why does the great sea ebb and flow? Why does the round world spin? Geraldine, Geraldine, Bid me my life renew, What is it worth unless I win, Love--love and you? Why, my heart, when we speak her name (Geraldine, Geraldine!), Throbs the word like a flinging flame?-- Why does the spring begin? Geraldine, Geraldine, Bid me indeed to be, Open your heart and take us in, Love--love and me. VI Space and dread and the dark-- Over a livid stretch of sky Cloud-monsters crawling like a funeral train Of huge primeval presences Stooping beneath the weight Of some enormous, rudimentary grief; While in the haunting loneliness The far sea waits and wanders, with a sound As of the trailing skirts of Destiny Passing unseen To some immitigable end With her grey henchman, Death. What larve, what spectre is this Thrilling the wilderness to life As with the bodily shape of Fear? What but a desperate sense, A strong foreboding of those dim, Interminable continents, forlorn And many-silenced in a dusk Inviolable utterly, and dead As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes In hugger-mugger through eternity? Life--life--let there be life! Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world! Life--give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream. VII There's a regret So grinding, so immitigably sad, Remorse thereby feels tolerant, even glad. . . . Do you not know it yet? For deeds undone Rankle, and snarl, and hunger for their due Till there seems naught so despicable as you In all the grin o' the sun. Like an old shoe The sea spurns and the land abhors, you lie About the beach of Time, till by-and-by Death, that derides you too-- Death, as he goes His ragman's round, espies you, where you stray, With half-an-eye, and kicks you out of his way; And then--and then, who knows But the kind Grave Turns on you, and you feel the convict Worm, In that black bridewell working out his term, Hanker and grope and crave? 'Poor fool that might-- That might, yet would not, dared not, let this be, Think of it, here and thus made over to me In the implacable night!' And writhing, fain And like a lover, he his fill shall take Where no triumphant memory lives to make His obscene victory vain. VIII (To J. A. C.)