Quatrains

I

Poetry

Who hath beheld the goddess face to face,
Blind with her beauty, all his days shall go
Climbing lone mountains towards her temple’s place,
Weighed with Song’s sweet, inexorable woe.

II

The Unimaginative

Each form of beauty’s but the new disguise
Of thoughts more beautiful than forms can be;
Sceptics, who search with unanointed eyes,
Never the Earth’s wild Fairy-dance shall see.

III

Music

God-born before the Sons of God, she hurled,
With awful symphonies of flood and fire,
God’s name on rocking chaos--world by world
Flamed as the universe rolled from her lyre.

IV

The Three Elements

They come as couriers of Heaven: their feet
Sonorous-sandaled with majestic awe;
In raiment of swift foam and wind and heat,
Blowing the trumpets of God’s wrath and law.

V

Rome

Above the Circus of the World she sat,
Beautiful and base, a harlot crowned with pride:
Fierce Nations, upon whom she sneered and spat,
Shrieked at her feet and for her pastime died.

VI

On Reading the Life of Haroun er Reshid

Down all the lanterned Bagdad of our youth
He steals, with golden justice for the poor:
Within his palace--you shall know the truth!--
A blood-smeared headsman hides behind each door.

VII

Mnemosyne

In classic beauty, cold, immaculate,
A voiceful sculpture, stern and still she stands,
Upon her brow deep-chiselled love and hate,
That sorrow o’er dead roses in her hands.

VIII

Beauty

High as a star, yet lowly as a flower,
Unknown she takes her unassuming place
At Earth’s proud masquerade--the appointed hour
Strikes, and, behold! the marvel of her face.

IX

The Stars

These--the bright symbols of man’s hope and fame,
In which he reads his blessing or his curse--
Are syllables with which God speaks His name
In the vast utterance of the universe.

X

Echo

Dweller in hollow places, hills and rocks,
Daughter of Silence and old Solitude,
Tip-toe she stands within her cave or wood,
Her only life the noises that she mocks.