Poems by Isaac Rosenberg/The Song of Tel the Nubian

by Isaac Rosenberg

II

THE SONG OF TEL THE NUBIAN

Small dazzling face!
I shut you in my soul;
How can I perish now?

But thence a strange decay—
Your fragile gleaming wrists
Waver my days and shake my life
To golden tremors. I have no life at all,
Only thin golden tremors
That shudder over the abyss of days
Which hedged my spirit, my spirit your prison walls
That shrunk like phantasms with your vivid beauty—

Towering and widening till
The sad moonless place
Throngs with a million torches
And spears of flaming wings.