— 7 —
Lilies were on his cheeks and roses too.
His eyes were sad in joy sometimes. He said
Oft in his close abandonments, that woo
Love to be more love than love can be, «Kiss
My eyelids till my closed eyes seem to guess
The kiss they feel laid in my heart's breast-bed.»
O Hadrian, what shall now thy cold life be?
What boots it to be emperor over all?
His absence o'er thy visible empery
Throws a dim pall.
Now are thy nights widowed of love and kisses,
Now are thy days robbed of the night's awaiting,
Now are thy lips purposeless and thy blisses
No longer of the size of thy life, mating
Thy empire with thy love's bold tendernesses.
Now are thy doors closed upon beauty and joy.
Throw ashes on thy head!
Lo, lift thine eyes and see the lovely boy!
Naked he lies upon that memoried bed;
By thine own hand he lies uncovered.
There was he wont thy dangling sense to cloy,
And uncloy with more cloying, and annoy
With newer uncloying till thy senses bled.
His hand and mouth knew gamuts musical
Of vices thy worn spine was hurt to follow.
Sometimes it seemed to thee that all was hollow
In sense in each new straining of sucked lust.
Then still new crimes of fancy would he call
To thy shaken flesh, and thou wouldst tremble and fall
Back on thy cushions with thy mind's sense hushed.
«Beautiful was my love, yet melancholy.
He had that art, of love's arts most unholy,
Of being lithely sad among lust's rages.
Now the Nile gave him up, the eternal Nile.
