213. The Tide of Love by Edmund Gosse. Nicholson & Lee, eds. 1917. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse

Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917.

213. The Tide of Love

By Edmund Gosse (b. 1849)

LOVE, flooding all the creeks of my dry soul,
From which the warm tide ebbed when I was born,
Following the moon of destiny, doth roll
His slow rich wave along the shore forlorn,
To make the ocean—God—and me, one whole.	5

So, shuddering in its ecstasy, it lies,
And, freed from mire and tangle of the ebb,
Reflects the waxing and the waning skies,
And bears upon its panting breast the web
Of night and her innumerable eyes.	10

Nor can conceive at all that it was blind,
But trembling with the sharp approach of love,
That, strenuous, moves without one breath of wind,
Gasps, as the wakening maid, on whom the Dove
With folded wings of deity declined.	15

She in the virgin sweetness of her dream
Thought nothing strange to find her vision true;
And I thus bathed in living rapture deem
No moveless drought my channel ever knew,
But rustled always with the murmuring stream.	20