Page:Poems and ballads (IA poemsballads00swinrich).pdf/220

Thine eyes that are quiet, thine hands that are tender, thy lips that are loving,
⁠Comfort and cool me as dew in the dawn of a moon like a dream;
And my heart yearns baffled and blind, moved vainly toward thee, and moving
⁠As the refluent seaweed moves in the languid exuberant stream,
Fair as a rose is on earth, as a rose under water in prison,
⁠That stretches and swings to the slow passionate pulse of the sea,
Closed up from the air and the sun, but alive, as a ghost rearisen,
⁠Pale as the love that revives as a ghost rearisen in me,
From the bountiful infinite west, from the happy memorial places
⁠Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight of the dead,
Where the fortunate islands are lit with the light of ineffable faces,
⁠And the sound of a sea without wind is about them, and sunset is red,
Come back to redeem and release me from love that recalls and represses,
⁠That cleaves to my flesh as a flame, till the serpent has eaten his fill;
From the bitter delights of the dark, and the feverish, the furtive caresses