The Secret Splendour

O wound of splendour that can never heal!

My hand on the heart seems stained with sunrise-red....

A god breaks here from the long night that is man,

A rose that will not rest in her clay-roots

But quivers to be plucked up by the sky.

How shall I give, to crowding forms that fade,

This lonely load of immortality?

A love crimsoning to a light beyond all arms.

Why have you dwelt in earth's small tenement

If your sole ache is to burst every bliss

And leave me homeless in my own heart's core?

Must you bleed vainly into! black abysms,

A waste of wonder till time flows no more?

Or are you Heaven's deep striving to be housed

Even where the sheer cold- darkness is an edge

That cuts into all flowering towards the Gold?

1952

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