Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

To Celia

Witter Bynner

THERE was a strangeness on your lips,

Lips that had been so sure;

You still were mine but in eclipse,

Beside me but obscure.

There was a cloud upon your heart;

For, Celia, where you lay,

Death, come to break your life apart,

Had led your love away.

Through the cold distance of your eyes

You could no longer see.

But when you died, you heard me rise

And followed suddenly.

And close beside me, looking down

As I did on the dead,

You made of time a wedding-gown,

Of space a marriage-bed.

I took, in you, death for a wife,

You married death in me,

Singing, “There is no other life,

No other God than we!”

In an old chamber softly lit

We heard the Chorale played,

And where you sat, an exquisite

Image of Life and lover of it,

Death sang a serenade.

I know now, Celia, what you heard,

And why you turned and smiled.

It was the white wings of a bird

Offering flight, and you were stirred

Like an adventurous child.

Death sang: “O lie upon your bier,

Uplift your countenance!”

Death bade me be your cavalier,

Called me to march and shed no tear

But sing to you and dance.

And when you followed, lured and led

By those mysterious wings,

And when I heard that you were dead,

I could not weep. I sang instead,

As a true lover sings.

Today a room is softly lit;

I hear the Chorale played.

And where you come, an exquisite

Image of death and lover of it,

Life sings a serenade.

Love has been sung a thousand ways—

So let it be;

The songs ascending in your praise

Through all my days

Are three.

Your cloud-white body first I sing;

Your love was heaven’s blue,

And I, a bird, flew carolling

In ring on ring

Of you.

Your nearness is the second song;

When God began to be,

And bound you strongly, right or wrong,

With his own thong,

To me.

But oh, the song, eternal, high,

That tops these two!—

You live forever, you who die,

I am not I

But you.