| |
| SHE is hot to the sea that crouches beside, | |
| Human and hot to the cool stars peering down, | |
| My passionate city, my quivering town, | |
| And her dark blood, tide upon purple tide, | |
| With throbs as of thunder beats, | 5 |
| With leaping rhythms and vast, is swirled | |
| Through the shaken lengths of her veinèd streets— | |
| She pulses, the heart of a world! | |
| |
| I have thrilled with her ecstasy, agony, woe— | |
| Hath she a mood that I do not know? | 10 |
| The winds of her music tumultuous have seized me and swayed me, | |
| Have lifted, have swung me around | |
| In their whirls as of cyclonic sound; | |
| Her passions have torn me and tossed me and brayed me; | |
| Drunken and tranced and dazzled with visions and gleams, | 15 |
| I have spun with her dervish priests; | |
| I have searched to the souls of her haunted beasts | |
| And found love sleeping there; | |
| I have soared on the wings of her flashing dreams; | |
| I have sunk with her dull despair; | 20 |
| I have sweat with her travails and cursed with her pains; | |
| I have swelled with her foolish pride; | |
| I have raged through a thick red mist at one with her branded Cains, | |
| With her broken Christs have died. | |
| |
| O beautiful half-god city of visions and love! | 25 |
| O hideous half-brute city of hate! | |
| O wholly human and baffled and passionate town! | |
| The throes of thy burgeoning, stress of thy fight, | |
| Thy bitter, blind struggle to gain for thy body a soul, | |
| I have known, I have felt, and been shaken thereby! | 30 |
| Wakened and shaken and broken, | |
| For I hear in thy thunders terrific that throb through thy rapid veins | |
| The beat of the heart of a world. | |
| |
