Collected Works (Vol. III)

172 ORPHEUS Ah! the calm wave retires. Down all the fearful fires Go thundering to darkness, so dissever Their being from pure being, that the river Of love is waveless now, and is pure love for ever. Then mightier than all birth of stars or suns, Breaks the vast flood and trembles in its tide. Serene and splendid shine the mystic ones, Exult, appal, reiterate, abide. Timid and fleet the earth Comes rushing back to birth, Brighter and greener, radiant with gold Of a diviner sun, An exultation Of life to life, of light to light untold. I? I remain, and see Across eternity My lover’s face, and gaze, and know the worth Of love’s life to the glowing earth, The kiss that wakes all life unto a better birth. So the swoon broke. I saw the face (Shining with Love’s reverberate grace) Of my own love across the lawn, As warm and tender as the dawn Tinting the snows of heaven-born hills, Enamelling the mountain rills With light’s chameleon-coloured dyes ; So shone the love-light in grey eyes, Changing for laughter and for tears, Changeless for joy of myriad years. This, this endures; there is no lover, No loved one ; all the ages cover These things from sight: but this abides Floating above the whelming tides Of time and space: abides for ever Whether the lovers join or sever. There is no change: the love exists Beyond the moment’s suns and mists In me, abiding: and I see No lover in Eurydice, Save that her kiss awoke in me This knowledge, this supreme content, Annihilation of the event, The vast eternal element Of utter being, bliss, and thought, In dissolution direly wrought Of sense, identity’s eclipse, The shadow of a lover’s lips. The awful steel of Death divides The alternation of the tides Of consciousness, and binds in bliss The dead man to the girl’s live kiss. So sped my wooing: now I surely think Suspended here upon the burning brink Of this dim agony, invading sense, That bliss should still abide: but now I shrink, Fall from the crags of memory, and abide Now in this nature-life, basilisk-eyed, And serpent-stinging : yea, I perish thence. That perishes which was: and I am tied Unto myself: the ‘‘I” springs up again Bound to the wheel of speedless sense and pain, None loosing me. Past is the utter bliss ; Present the strong fact of the death, the stain Of the marred lives: I meditate awhile Not on the mere light of the girl, the smile Deepening down to the extremest kiss; Not of the long joys of the little isle Set in Ionian waters, where the years Passed, one long passion, too divine for tears, Too deep for laughter: but on that divine Sense beyond sense, the shadow of the spheres Lost in the all-pervading light of love: That bliss all passion and all praise above ; Impersonal, that fervour of the shrine Changed to pure peace that had its substance of