Classic Poem

I paint your portrait:
I seize one of your beautiful moments:
I take you when you sit at the table before the mirror
And comb your hair and braid it and pin it up ...

First it is all a rhapsody of colour,
Blue-and-rose silk, and green stockings, and black pumps,
And eyes of the sky-colour and hair of intermelting tints of tan and olive and chestnut running with gold,
And faint roses in the cheeks and along the lips,
But somehow all a drift of sea-blue and shell-pink,
Something of the wild rose,
Something not of night nor noon nor splendour of sunset,
But all of the sunrise ...

Thus you are a vague intoxication: I must see you more sharply ...

You are not tall, and yet you are so straight and so slender that you seem tall:
It seems first a boy's body, but it is eternally feminine with soft adorable beauty:
The gestures, the graceful and sure motions of hands and feet, the tilt and turn of the head
The joy and sadness that startle each other across your face:
The delicate shadows and lights that fly and intermingle and pass and seem essentially you:
The exquisite perfumes, the art of your subtle clothes:
Your voice's music ranging from scarce-heard syllables of sighed delight
To clear treble of laughing narrative and defiant notes of assertion and anger:
The Southern accent, words that rise like the foot of a toedancer and come lightly down on the tip:
Your soft and fleeting touch, hands that caress like passing gossamer:
That something all about you that makes me think of a singing bird,
That makes me think always of England's lark.

I still miss you: you are too changeable:
I have seen you when you looked like an Elizabethan page,
And I have seen you when you were smart and dashing and would cut a figure galloping on a horse:
And I have seen you demure in veil and lace and scarf, like some antebellum maiden of the South ...
And there are young moments, when you are the wide-eyed smiling child,
And old moments of haggard cheeks and thin drawn lips and miserable eyes ...
And drugged moments, the trance of passion,
And brilliant moments, the flash of intellect ...

No painter could paint you: he would have to use magic words as well as line and colour,
And fill a whole gallery with portraits,
And then set it all to music ...
He could not see you, unless he loved you,
And if he loved you he would confront the unsearchable mysteries
And go dumb and maimed and blind ...

No: I can only get glimpses of your soul; I see your soul forever with the body a mere wavering of light and shadow,
Cloud and mist and sparkle and changing colour ...
See! I have quite lost you sitting there at the table, braiding your hair ...
Your body is only the language of your soul,
Its speech, its music, the way your soul has of speaking to mine ...