Love

Are the pale bodies of these maidens
Wisps of the smoke of life
Burning in my brain,
Blown across the green fields of Spring
From the smouldering fires of Winter?
For I am a heap of dead generations
Smouldering in the sun.

I am pale as a candle-flame in the sunlight,
My body is as white as wax.
I am dim as a wave falling from a cliff of light,
A soundless invisible flame,
And those wisps of smoke wandering in the daylight
Are the bodies of slender girls,
Incense of earth's imagination.

It is blown among the walls of cities,
It floats curled along the streets
As though where earth touched invisible clouds
On the clear pavements their bright skirts fluttered,
A snowy border of the clear day;
The earth dark as a still wood garden
About the feet of February snowdrops.

Desire darkens like a trellis abandoned by the rose;
A winter sun is shining;
The passing clouds trail their cold shadows
Drooping a festoon of ghostly blooms.
Where is the rose that is vanished?
Neither morning nor yet the evening
Looks upon her face.

I lie at the foot of the trellis,
Earth smouldering slowly in the sun.
Behold the framework of dead imagination
And a thin faint haze in the landscape,
Life, smoking subtly in the brain!
Black and myriad the dead sticks of desire,
And the Void bloomless upon the trellis!

Out of the darkness, under the mantling sky,
Dawn has brought forth a pale clump of blossom.
Through all outspread imagination
A slender fire is creeping,
Green fires trailing on the cold black sky,
White maidens of earth leap dancing,
For the Rose has come again upon the trellis.