Classic Poem

I DID not love you, and I ever said
I did not love you. So the end was told.
How did it happen with so strait a theme
The days could play their winding harmonies,
With ritornello? Oh, I hated me,
That when I loved you not, yet I could feel
Some charm in me the deeper for your love;
Some singing-robe invisible — and spun
Of your own worship — fold me silverly
In very moonlight, so that I walked fair
When you were by, who had no wish to be
The fairer for your eyes! But at some cost
Of other life the hyacinth grows blue,
And sweetens ever. ... So it is with us,
The sadder race. I would have fled from you;
And yet I felt some fibre in myself
Binding me here, to search one moment yet —
The only well that gave me back a star, —
Your eyes reflecting. And I grew aware
How worship that must ever spend and burn,
Will have its deity, from gold or stone;
Till that fain womanhood that would be fair
And lovable, — the hunger of the plant,
Against my soul's commandment reached and took
The proffered fruit, more potent day by day:

Oh, it was not an artful lowered brow!
The lifted eyelash would have seemed to you
Desirable, or shadowed backward look.
I warn you in a dream. My own heart hears,
Cold and far-off, unhastened, curious,
A sea-plant fed with alien element, —
Watching through twilight eyes some underwave.
Will you not go? ...
And yet, why will you go?