Blown off the scene;
Blood could not ease the bitter lust
That galled Faustine.
All round the foul fat furrows reeked,
Where blood sank in;
The circus splashed and seethed and shrieked
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All round Faustine.
But these are gone now: years entomb
The dust and din;
Yea, even the bath’s fierce reek and fume
That slew Faustine.
Was life worth living then? and now
Is life worth sin?
Where are the imperial years? and how
Are you Faustine?
Your soul forgot her joys, forgot
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Her times of teen;
Yea, this life likewise will you not
Forget, Faustine?
For in the time we know not of
Did fate begin
Weaving the web of days that wove
Your doom, Faustine.
The threads were wet with wine, and all
Were smooth to spin;
They wove you like a Bacchanal,
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The first Faustine.
And Bacchus cast your mates and you
Wild grapes to glean;
Your flower-like lips were dashed with dew
From his, Faustine.
Your drenched loose hands were stretched to hold
The vine’s wet green,
Long ere they coined in Roman gold
Your face, Faustine.
Then after change of soaring feather
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And winnowing fin,
You woke in weeks of feverish weather,
A new Faustine.
A star upon your birthday burned,
Whose fierce serene
Red pulseless planet never yearned
In heaven, Faustine.
Stray breaths of Sapphic song that blew
Through Mitylene
Shook the fierce quivering blood in you
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By night, Faustine.
The shameless nameless love that makes
Hell’s iron gin
Shut on you like a trap that breaks
The soul, Faustine.
And when your veins were void and dead,
What ghosts unclean
Swarmed round the straitened barren bed
That hid Faustine?
What sterile growths of sexless root
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Or epicene?
What flower of kisses without fruit
Of love, Faustine?
What adders came to shed their coats?
What coiled obscene
Small serpents with soft stretching throats
Caressed Faustine?
But the time came of famished hours,
Maimed loves and mean,
This ghastly thin-faced time of ours,
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To spoil Faustine.
You seem a thing that hinges hold,
A love-machine
With clockwork joints of supple gold –
No more, Faustine.
Not godless, for you serve one God,
The Lampsacene,
Who metes the gardens with his rod;
Your lord, Faustine.
If one should love you with real love
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(Such things have been,
Things your fair face knows nothing of,
It seems, Faustine);
That clear hair heavily bound back,
The lights wherein
Shift from dead blue to burnt-up black;
Your throat, Faustine,
Strong, heavy, throwing out the face
And hard bright chin
And shameful scornful lips that grace
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Their shame, Faustine,
Curled lips, long since half kissed away,
Still sweet and keen;
You’d give him – poison shall we say?
Or what, Faustine?
A Cameo
There was a graven image of Desire
Painted with red blood on a ground of gold
Passing between the young men and the old,
And by him Pain, whose body shone like fire,
And Pleasure with gaunt hands that grasped their hire.
Of his left wrist, with fingers clenched and cold,
The insatiable Satiety kept hold,
Walking with feet unshod that pashed the mire.
The senses and the sorrows and the sins,
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And the strange loves that suck the breasts of Hate
Till lips and teeth bite in their sharp indenture,
Followed like beasts with flap of wings and fins.
Death stood aloof behind a gaping grate,
Upon whose lock was written Peradventure.
Song before Death
(FROM THE FRENCH)
1795
Sweet mother, in a minute’s span
Death parts thee and my love of thee;
Sweet love, that yet art living man,
Come back, true love, to comfort me.
Back, ah, come back! ah wellaway!
But my love comes not any day.
As roses, when the warm West blows,
Break to full flower and sweeten spring,
My soul would break to a glorious rose
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In such wise at his whispering.
In vain I listen; wellaway!
My love says nothing any day.
You that will weep for pity of love
On the low place where I am lain,
I pray you, having wept enough,
Tell him for whom I bore such pain
That he was yet, ah! wellaway!
My true love to my dying day.
Rococo
Take hands and part with laughter;
Touch lips and part with tears;
Once more and no more after,
Whatever comes with years.
We twain shall not remeasure
The ways that left us twain;
Nor crush the lees of pleasure
From sanguine grapes of pain.
We twain once well in sunder,
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What will the mad gods do
For hate with me, I wonder,
Or what for love with you?
Forget them till November,
And dream there’s April yet;
Forget that I remember,
And dream that I forget.
Time found our tired love sleeping,
And kissed away his breath;
But what should we do weeping,
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Though light love sleep to death?
We have drained his lips at leisure,
Till there’s not left to drain
A single sob of pleasure,
A single pulse of pain.
Dream that the lips once breathless
Might quicken if they would;
Say that the soul is deathless;
Dream that the gods are good;
Say March may wed September,
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And time divorce regret;
But not that you remember,
And not that I forget.
We have heard from hidden places
What love scarce lives and hears:
We have seen on fervent faces
The pallor of strange tears:
We have trod the wine-vat’s treasure,
Whence, ripe to steam and stain,
Foams round the feet of pleasure
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The blood-red must of pain.
Remembrance may recover
And time bring back to time
The name of your first lover,
The ring of my first rhyme;
But rose-leaves of December
The frosts of June shall fret,
The day that you remember,
&nbs
p; The day that I forget.
The snake that hides and hisses
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In heaven we twain have known;
The grief of cruel kisses,
The joy whose mouth makes moan;
The pulse’s pause and measure,
Where in one furtive vein
Throbs through the heart of pleasure
The purpler blood of pain.
We have done with tears and treasons
And love for treason’s sake;
Room for the swift new seasons,
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The years that burn and break,
Dismantle and dismember
Men’s days and dreams, Juliette;
For love may not remember,
But time will not forget.
Life treads down love in flying,
Time withers him at root;
Bring all dead things and dying,
Reaped sheaf and ruined fruit,
Where, crushed by three days’ pressure,
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Our three days’ love lies slain;
And earlier leaf of pleasure,
And latter flower of pain.
Breathe close upon the ashes,
It may be flame will leap;
Unclose the soft close lashes,
Lift up the lids, and weep.
Light love’s extinguished ember,
Let one tear leave it wet
For one that you remember
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And ten that you forget.
Stage Love
When the game began between them for a jest,
He played king and she played queen to match the best;
Laughter soft as tears, and tears that turned to laughter,
These were things she sought for years and sorrowed after.
Pleasure with dry lips, and pain that walks by night;
All the sting and all the stain of long delight;
These were things she knew not of, that knew not of her,
When she played at half a love with half a lover.
Time was chorus, gave them cues to laugh or cry;
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They would kill, befool, amuse him, let him die;
Set him webs to weave to-day and break to-morrow,
Till he died for good in play, and rose in sorrow.
What the years mean; how time dies and is not slain;
How love grows and laughs and cries and wanes again;
These were things she came to know, and take their measure,
When the play was played out so for one man’s pleasure.
The Leper
Nothing is better, I well think,
Than love; the hidden well-water
Is not so delicate to drink:
This was well seen of me and her.
I served her in a royal house;
I served her wine and curious meat.
For will to kiss between her brows,
I had no heart to sleep or eat.
Mere scorn God knows she had of me,
10
A poor scribe, nowise great or fair,
Who plucked his clerk’s hood back to see
Her curled-up lips and amorous hair.
I vex my head with thinking this.
Yea, though God always hated me,
And hates me now that I can kiss
Her eyes, plait up her hair to see
How she then wore it on the brows,
Yet am I glad to have her dead
Here in this wretched wattled house
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Where I can kiss her eyes and head.
Nothing is better, I well know,
Than love; no amber in cold sea
Or gathered berries under snow:
That is well seen of her and me.
Three thoughts I make my pleasure of:
First I take heart and think of this:
That knight’s gold hair she chose to love,
His mouth she had such will to kiss.
Then I remember that sundawn
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I brought him by a privy way
Out at her lattice, and thereon
What gracious words she found to say.
(Cold rushes for such little feet –
Both feet could lie into my hand.
A marvel was it of my sweet
Her upright body could so stand.)
‘Sweet friend, God give you thank and grace;
Now am I clean and whole of shame,
Nor shall men burn me in the face
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For my sweet fault that scandals them.’
I tell you over word by word.
She, sitting edgewise on her bed,
Holding her feet, said thus. The third,
A sweeter thing than these, I said.
God, that makes time and ruins it
And alters not, abiding God,
Changed with disease her body sweet,
The body of love wherein she abode.
Love is more sweet and comelier
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Than a dove’s throat strained out to sing.
All they spat out and cursed at her
And cast her forth for a base thing.
They cursed her, seeing how God had wrought
This curse to plague her, a curse of his.
Fools were they surely, seeing not
How sweeter than all sweet she is.
He that had held her by the hair,
With kissing lips blinding her eyes,
Felt her bright bosom, strained and bare,
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Sigh under him, with short mad cries
Out of her throat and sobbing mouth
And body broken up with love,
With sweet hot tears his lips were loth
Her own should taste the savour of,
Yea, he inside whose grasp all night
Her fervent body leapt or lay,
Stained with sharp kisses red and white,
Found her a plague to spurn away.
I hid her in this wattled house,
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I served her water and poor bread.
For joy to kiss between her brows
Time upon time I was nigh dead.
Bread failed; we got but well-water
And gathered grass with dropping seed.
I had such joy of kissing her,
I had small care to sleep or feed.
Sometimes when service made me glad
The sharp tears leapt between my lids,
Falling on her, such joy I had
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To do the service God forbids.
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon Page 13