The Winged Beetle

4 ROSA COELI We radiate love, a velvet-soft complaint, Most like the echo of a chime at vesper Rung far across narcissus-haunted leas, Lilied lagoons, and moon-enchanted seas, By the high-bosomed boy, large-eyed, with fasting faint That shares an hermitage with some devoutest saint. III As, in our life, I passed the awful gate Where like a Cerberus sate The triform silence, Fate, And bade the red blood bloom Within that Palace of untasted gloom ; As, in our life, confronting the black forms— Colossal ghosts, like storms !— I did abide in the most holy hall And let the dread word fall, Nor bade the red axe falter There as I bowed mine head Upon the amber altar, And shed my life out there before ye all, Careless if I had summoned from the skies Some young true God, or spoiled the sacrifice, And were but dead as any man is dead ! So I have given up my inmost life Even unto you, sweet wife, Careless—yet conscious of the babe-stirred womb Of some dread Mother older than the Tomb, Wiser than Life, more pitiful than Death.