Yet she shall move the strange desires of men;
For in her lie dim glories that she dreams
Not of, and on her ever broods a light
Her Cyprian eyes ne’er saw; and evermore
Round her pale face shall pleading faces press;
Round her shall mortal passion beat and ebb.
Years hence, as waves on islands burst in foam,
Madly shall lives on her strange beauty break.
When she is yours and in ambrosial glooms
You secretly would chain her kiss by kiss,
Though close you hold her in your hungering arms,
And with voluptuous pantings you and she
Mingle, and seem the insentient moment one,
Yet will your groping soul but lean to her
Across the dusk, as hill to lonely hill,
And in your warmest raptures you shall learn
There is a citadel surrenders not
To any captor of the outer walls;
In sorrow you shall learn there is a light
Illumines not, a chamber it were best
To leave untrod.
To leave untrod. O Ares, dread the word
That silences this timorous nightingale,
The touch that wakens strings too frail for hands;
For, giving her, I gain what you shall lose;
Forsaking her, I hold her closer still.
The sea shall take a deeper sound; the stars
Stranger and more mysterious henceforth
Shall seem, the darkening sky-line of the West
6
