COLLECTED POEMS
No vampire thoughts to suck the coward blood,
The life, the very soul of her.
Yes, Yes,
They might come back. . . . But why should they come back ?
Why was it she had suffered? Why had she
Struggled and grown these years to demonstrate
That close without those hovering clouds of gloom
And through them here and there forever gleamed
The Light itself, the life, the love, the glory,
Which was of its own radiance good proof
That all the rest was darkness and blind sight?
And who was she? The woman she had known
The woman she had petted and called "I"
The woman she had pitied, and at last
Commiserated for the most abject
And persecuted of all womankind,
Could it be she that had sought out the way
To measure and thereby to quench in her
The woman's fear the fear of her not fearing?
A nervous little laugh that lost itself,
Like logic in a dream, fluttered her thoughts
An instant there that ever she should ask
What she might then have told so easily
So easily that Annandale had frowned,
Had he been given wholly to be told
The truth of what had never been before
So passionately, so inevitably
Confessed.
For she could see from where she sat
The sheets that he had bound up like a book
And covered with red leather; and her eyes
Could see between the pages of the book,
Though her eyes, like them, were closed. And she could read
206
