A ROSE
WHAT do you ask of me with your beauty, what are you urging
Of labour and painful aspiring to flatter your perfection?
What secretness of love with terrible blushes surging
Unseen, have found in you at last their passionate reflection?
Of labour and painful aspiring to flatter your perfection?
What secretness of love with terrible blushes surging
Unseen, have found in you at last their passionate reflection?
What dreams that lovers knew, as sleep with subtle magic
Tore off the rags of life and made her dance with body spangled,
Drew back the vacant hours, the tedious and the tragic,
And showed the glittering souls from bodies we had mangled;—
Tore off the rags of life and made her dance with body spangled,
Drew back the vacant hours, the tedious and the tragic,
And showed the glittering souls from bodies we had mangled;—
What visions made you, emblem of longing and love that has died unrequited,
And all lost joys, and tears, and beauty passionately given,
Winked at by folly, skewered by the butcher, danced on and slighted,
That now spring up from death, showing their slayers the colours of Heaven?
And all lost joys, and tears, and beauty passionately given,
Winked at by folly, skewered by the butcher, danced on and slighted,
That now spring up from death, showing their slayers the colours of Heaven?
You have burst from the ground with your joy, you are pining and bleeding,
Your scent is heavy with sorrowful love; oh, memories clinging,
What do you ask of my soul with such fierceness of pleading,
I that was glad to forget . . . What do you need of my singing?
Your scent is heavy with sorrowful love; oh, memories clinging,
What do you ask of my soul with such fierceness of pleading,
I that was glad to forget . . . What do you need of my singing?
1916
32
