The Secret Splendour

Waste

(Suggested by a poem of Yeats's)

If she had been a statue with last arms,

We might have dreamed her soul a mystic fire

Of ecstasy clasping invisible gods.

But she has let her love gird like a crown

Ablaze with planet prodigalities

The sleepy head of a fool... O limbs of light

Wasting the nectar of your destiny

Save for the two rapt kisses of my gaze—

O silver benediction on the air,

Your call was like a moon glimmering through rain!

For spirit-poignancies, like nightingales,

Awoke from some vague silence in my heart;

But neither by deep song nor the seraphic

Whiteness of your own beauty could the soul

In you be roused. Deaf unto deaf desire,

Mortal unto a mortal groped your clay—

The shining secret of a love unknown

Lost in the tenebrous embrace of time.

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