| HERE, where love’s stuff is body, arm and side | |
| Are stabbing-sweet’gainst chair and lamp and wall. | |
| In every touch more intimate meanings hide; | |
| And flaming brains are the white heart of all. | |
| |
| Here, million pulses to one centre beat: | 5 |
| Closed in by men’s vast friendliness, alone, | |
| Two can be drunk with solitude, and meet | |
| On the sheer point where sense with knowing’s one. | |
| |
| Here the green-purple clanging royal night, | |
| And the straight lines and silent walls of town, | 10 |
| And roar, and glare, and dust, and myriad white | |
| Undying passers, pinnacle and crown | |
| |
| Intensest heavens between close-lying faces | |
| By the lamp’s airless fierce ecstatic fire; | |
| And we’ve found love in little hidden places, | 15 |
| Under great shades, between the mist and mire. | |
| |
| Stay! though the woods are quiet, and you’ve heard | |
| Night creep along the hedges. Never go | |
| Where tangled foliage shrouds the crying bird, | |
| And the remote winds sigh, and waters flow! | 20 |
| |
| Lest—as our words fall dumb on windless noons, | |
| Or hearts grow hushed and solitary, beneath | |
| Unheeding stars and unfamiliar moons, | |
| Or boughs bend over, close and quiet as death,— | |
| |
| Unconscious and unpassionate and still, | 25 |
| Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, | |
| And gradually along the stranger hill | |
| Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air, | |
| |
| And suddenly there’s no meaning in our kiss, | |
| And your lit upward face grows, where we lie, | 30 |
| Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is, | |
| And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky. | |
