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Home  »  The English Poets  »  From Sister Songs

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Francis Thompson (1859–1907)

From Sister Songs

1895

A KISS? for a child’s kiss?

Aye, goddess, even for this.

Once, bright Sylviola! in days not far,

Once—in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt

My dreams, a grim, unbidden visitant—

Forlorn, and faint, and stark,

I had endured through watches of the dark

The abashless inquisition of each star,

Yea, was the outcast mark

Of all those heavenly passers’ scrutiny;

Stood bound and helplessly

For Time to shoot his barbéd minutes at me;

Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour

In night’s slow-wheeléd car;

Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length

From under the dread wheels; and, bled of strength,

I waited the inevitable last.

Then came there past

A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower

Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,

And through the city-streets blown withering!—

And of her own scant pittance did she give,

That I might eat and live;

Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.

Therefore I kissed in thee

The heart of childhood, so divine for me;

And her, through what sore ways,

And what unchildish days,

Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive.

Therefore I kissed in thee

Her, child! and innocency,

And spring, and all things that have gone from me,

And that shall never be;

All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss,

Came with thee to my kiss.

And ah! so long myself had strayed afar

From child and woman, and the boon earth’s green,

And all wherewith life’s face is fair beseen;

Journeying its journey bare

Five suns, except of the all-kissing sun

Unkissed of one;

Almost I had forgot

The healing harms,

And whitest witchery, a-lurk in that

Authentic cestus of two girdling arms;

And I remembered not

The subtle sanctities which dart

From childish lips’ unvalued precious brush,

Nor how it makes the sudden lilies push

Between the loosening fibres of the heart.

Then, that thy little kiss

Should be to me all this,

Let workaday wisdom blink sage lids thereat;

Which towers a flight three hedgerows high, poor bat!

And straightway charts me out the empyreal air.

Its chart I wing not by, its canon of worth

Scorn not, nor reck though mine should breed it mirth;

And howso thou and I may be disjoint,

Yet still my falcon spirit makes her point

Over the covert where

Thou, sweetest quarry, hast put in from her!