Still, still, without ceasing,
I feel it increasing,
This fervour of holy desire;
And often exclaim,
Let me die in the flame
Of a love that can never expire!

Had I words to explain
What she must sustain
Who dies to the world and its ways;
How joy and affright,
Distress and delight,
Alternately chequer her days:

Thou, sweetly severe!
I would make thee appear,
In all thou art pleased to award.
Not more in the sweet
Than the bitter I meet
My tender and merciful Lord.

This faith, in the dark,

Who love would seek,
Let him love evermore
And seldom speak:
For in love's domain
Silence must reign;
Or it brings the heart
Smart
And pain.

Come, the wind may never again
Blow as now it blows for us;
And the stars may never again shine as now they shine;
Long before October returns,
Seas of blood will have parted us;
And you must crush the love in your heart, and I the love in mine!

The bread is mine
Unmixed with leaven
And the purple wine
Of the Vines of Heaven;
I have asked to see
If my love shall be
At the Throne of Three
With the splendid Seven.

To a blinding car
Four living creatures
Enhamessed are,
Whence One whose features
Outshone the skies
At noon, replies
With her burning eyes—
The eternal teachers—

“Thy love is a sword
In the heart of slaughter,
Thy love is a word
Of the high-king’s daughter,
A song that is sung
In a mystic tongue,
A fountain sprung

Sigh on, sad heart, for Love's eclipse
And Beauty's fairest queen,
Though 'tis not for my peasant lips
To soil her name between:
A king might lay his sceptre down,
But I am poor and nought,
The brow should wear a golden crown
That wears her in its thought.
The diamonds glancing in her hair,
Whose sudden beams surprise,
Might bid such humble hopes beware
The glancing of her eyes;
Yet looking once, I look'd too long,
And if my love is sin,
Death follows on the heels of wrong,
And kills the crime within.

Like a flower, but not a flower
No one cares when it falls
And lies discarded at the roadside
But though
Unmoved, I think about
The tangle of wounded tendrils
Lovely eyes full of sleep
About to open,yet
Still in dreams, following the wind ten thousand miles
In search of love
Startled, time and again, by the oriole's cry

Do not pity the flower that flies off
Grieve for the western garden
Its fallen red already beyond mending --
Now, after morning rain
What's left?
A pond full of broken duckweed

In summer eves the flowers have languors of
Women, and suffer as do souls with love;
Imploring hymens they shall die of soon,
They dream and tremble underneath the moon;
Yea, flowers have looks like women's great moist eyes,
They are as full of love and coy surprise.
And roses, white as the immaculate globes
That peep from under dark half-opened robes,
Roses amid the darkness green, while sings
The nightingale her moon-imaginings
And dies with passion for their bodies pale,
Roses forth bursting from their odorous veil,

Like a silkworm weaving
her house with love
from her marrow,
and dying
in her body's threads
winding tight, round
and round,
I burn
desiring what the heart desires.

Cut through, O Lord,
my heart's greed,
and show me
your way out,

O Lord white as jasmine

This love puts all humanity from me;
I can but maledict her, pray her dead,
For giving love and getting love of thee—
Feeding a heart that else mine own had fed!

How much I love I know not, life not known,
Save as some unit I would add love by;
But this I know, my being is but thine own—
Fused from its separateness by ecstasy.

And thus I grasp thy amplitudes, of her
Ungrasped, though helped by nigh-regarding eyes;
Canst thou then hate me as an envier
Who see unrecked what I so dearly prize?

I will be faithful to thee; aye, I will!
And Death shall choose me with a wondering eye
That he did not discern and domicile
One his by right ever since that last Good-bye!

I have no care for friends, or kin, or prime
Of manhood who deal gently with me here;
Amid the happy people of my time
Who work their love’s fulfilment, I appear

Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came;
Despised by souls of Now, who would disjoint
The mind from memory, and make Life all aim,