Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.

Creation Songs

By Muriel Strode

(From A Soul’s Faring, 1921) I I WILL tell you the things that will ravish your ear to hear, for I am Life’s lover.
She told me her secrets, as she lay in my wanton arms.
She told me the things of her deep yearning, of her secret heart.
She told them to my love for her, to the press of my breast.
She told herself to my kisses.	5
She met my warm breath with disclosures, as she held me close in an informing embrace.
II I am Life’s lover!
I plant the meaning of my great yearning upon her upturned lips.
I press her to my breast in a great answering.
She shall define the meaning of my fire and fever.	10
III I am the love-mad of life.
I have reached out in my pain to the love-frenzied grouse.
I have called in my understanding to the deer in their rutting season.
I have come with gentle words to the mating chirpings in the eaves.
I have touched tenderly the seeking pollen.	15
I have come with bated breath to the spawn at the beginnings of streams.
I am the ache of overfullness.
My breasts are crowded with containing.
My hands tremble with the eagerness of me.
I am rent and torn with the pain of the unexpressed.	20
IV I am drunk with being,—
Life’s inebriate reeling down an enchanted way.
I shout my maudlin greeting to the trees.
I grasp familiarly the gentle fingers of the grass.
I press my wine-wet lips to the roses with my insistent kissing.	25
V I know the thrill of the grasses when the rain pours over them.
I know the trembling of the leaves when the winds sweep through them.
I know what the white clover felt as it held a drop of dew pressed close in its beauteousness.
I know the quivering of the fragrant petals at the touch of the pollen-legged bees.
I know what the stream said to the dipping willows, and what the moon said to the sweet lavender.	30
I know what the stars said when they came stealthily down and crept fondly into the tops of the trees.
VI I am the omnipotent life, the potency-thrill.
I am the fructifier meeting the urge of space, scattering my spawn like the dust of stars in the Milky Way.
I am red fire leaping in and out of channels, the insistence of me, the yearning.
I am the demand.	35
VII I am drunk with the wine of me, intoxicant of my own being,
Bacchante of my own soul’s steepings,
Beset by the realization of me, driven by knowing.
I pour myself out like the singing starling.
I drink, and kiss Life’s wanton lips with the dripping lips of me.	40
VIII I am the universe’s harlot,
Selling myself to ecstasy’s thrills;
Giving myself to be debauched of stars, ravished of ineffableness;
Seduced by a wanton ungraspableness;
Coming to marriage bed with infinity’s horde,	45
Wanton wife of the eternity of things.