The Secret Splendour

Vision

Rapt in her virgin smile I had no room

For any cry or colour of common days:

The world was one huge emptiness, a gloom

Lost in the angelic dreamlight on her face.

All lesser love passed from my memory—

 But, far above the mind's unearthly gaze,

In deep miraculous spirit-poignancy

A dazzling paradise flowered alone,

 Wafting a fragrant immortality

Of purple widenesses whose joy unknown

Throbbed in a multitudinous passion of light

To make her human breath one with its own!

And now her soul yearned out, a lily of white

Vigil and prayer unsheathed by sable years,

Seeking that gorgeous bloom of the Infinite

Whose perfume called across the atmospheres—

"O lily of soul long captive in the sod,

 Uplift thy face beyond the un verse

And, time-bare, merge in thy mate, the Rose of God!"

But like an ageless sob from her—"Too long

 A labyrinthine gloom the flesh has trod:

Surely with thy perennial colour-song

Thou wilt bestrew its unillumined way,

And with our nuptial's sky-warm reveries throng

The barren sleep of miserable clay?

Not on the heights alone but in the abyss

 Love me, that from the passion of thy ray

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All future life may spring a child of bliss!

Why was I pent below if not to be

 A heart of time which might d aw down thy kiss

And people earth with thy eternity?"...

Then I awoke. A delicate golden mirth.

 Trembled through my dim veins: each cell of me

Lay like a seed of shadowless new-birth.

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