| |
| TAKE back your suit. | |
| It came when I was weary and distraught | |
| With hunger. Could I guess the fruit you brought? | |
| I ate in mere desire of any food, | |
| Nibbled its edge, and nowhere found it good. | 5 |
| Take back your suit. | |
| |
| Take back your love. | |
| It is a bird poach’d from my neighbor’s wood: | |
| Its wings are wet with tears, its beak with blood. | |
| ’T is a strange fowl with feathers like a crow: | 10 |
| Death’s raven, it may be, for all we know. | |
| Take back your love. | |
| |
| Take back your gifts. | |
| False is the hand that gave them; and the mind | |
| That plann’d them, as a hawk spread in the wind | 15 |
| To poise and snatch the trembling mouse below, | |
| To ruin where it dares—and then to go. | |
| Take back your gifts. | |
| |
| Take back your vows. | |
| Elsewhere you trimm’d and taught these lamps to burn; | 20 |
| You bring them stale and dim to serve my turn. | |
| You lit those candles in another shrine, | |
| Gutter’d and cold you offer them on mine. | |
| Take back your vows. | |
| |
| Take back your words. | 25 |
| What is your love? Leaves on a woodland plain, | |
| Where some are running and where some remain. | |
| What is your faith? Straws on a mountain height, | |
| Dancing like demons on Walpurgis night. | |
| Take back your words. | 30 |
| |
| Take back your lies. | |
| Have them again: they wore a rainbow face, | |
| Hollow with sin and leprous with disgrace: | |
| Their tongue was like a mellow turret bell | |
| To toll hearts burning into wide-lipp’d hell | 35 |
| Take back your lies. | |
| |
| Take back your kiss. | |
| Shall I be meek, and lend my lips again | |
| To let this adder daub them with his stain? | |
| Shall I turn cheek to answer, when I hate? | 40 |
| You kiss like Judas in the garden gate! | |
| Take back your kiss. | |
| |
| Take back delight, | |
| A paper boat launch’d on a heaving pool | |
| To please a child, and folded by a fool; | 45 |
| The wild elms roar’d: it sail’d—a yard or more. | |
| Out went our ship, but never came to shore. | |
| Take back delight. | |
| |
| Take back your wreath. | |
| Has it done service on a fairer brow? | 50 |
| Fresh, was it folded round her bosom snow? | |
| Her cast-off weed my breast will never wear: | |
| Your word is ‘love me;’ my reply, ‘despair!’ | |
| Take back your wreath. | |
| |
