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(From Nineveh and Other Poems, 1907)
YOUR body’s treasures are mine to-day, | |
| Though bitter as gall be their savour still; | |
| From head to foot shall my kisses play, | |
| Till naught is kept from their sovereign will! | |
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| The voice of my need supreme must guide | 5 |
| My passionate love to its destined goal; | |
| My feverish fingers shall seek and glide | |
| Until at the last I hold the soul. | |
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| My hot strong hands will no veil endure | |
| That shadows your radiant nakedness; | 10 |
| Lay bare each beauty, conceal no lure, | |
| Leave naught to hinder my fond caress! | |
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| Young blood beats onward, unchecked by shame, | |
| When passion’s harvest is ripe to reap; | |
| For who shall speak with the raging flame, | 15 |
| Or stay the cataract in its leap? | |
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| My armies have stormed at your city’s gate— | |
| I have conquered you, hold you. Might is right | |
| With the beasts of the wild that celebrate | |
| In the jungle their primal marriage night. | 20 |
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| You too are moved by the selfsame power, | |
| Your quick breath tells in its shuddering fall: | |
| There is naught so strong as love this hour— | |
| Call it god or beast, it is lord of all! | |
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| The god in me and the beast in me | 25 |
| And all deep things come up to light; | |
| And I would barter my soul to be | |
| The prize of love for a single night. | |
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| One long, long night of supreme desire, | |
| One long, long night of riot and rage; | 30 |
| For you are the sea and I the fire, | |
| And old as the world is the war we wage. | |
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| The old, old strife of woman and man | |
| That ever has been, and still shall be | |
| Until the day when the vaulted span | 35 |
| Shall sink a wreck in the whelming sea. | |
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| Once fed, no longer the wolf-pack raves: | |
| But love can never of madness tire, | |
| And I must drown in your passion’s waves, | |
| And you consume in my hot desire. | 40 |
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| This the law of the flowering south, | |
| Of the snow-clad north where the world is white … | |
| You shall faint and fall as I crush your mouth | |
| Beneath a conqueror’s ruthless might! | |
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| My life is poured in the stream of yours, | 45 |
| But fire and flood were not meant to mate: | |
| We shall never be one while the world endures— | |
| And the meaning of love at the last is hate! | |
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| My soul is drunk with your maddening charms; | |
| You have taken all—I have naught to lose. | 50 |
| About me tighten your slender arms | |
| With the very grip of the hangman’s noose. | |
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| So let us struggle, both flame and flood, | |
| Let love and hate and sense have play | |
| Till the slow dawn rises bathed in blood, | 55 |
| And you and I are dead ere day! | |
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