Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Andrew Macphail, comp. The Book of Sorrow. 1916.

Beauty’s Metempsychosis

William Watson (1858–1935)

THAT beauty such as thine

Should die indeed,

Were ordinance too wantonly malign!

No wit may reconcile so cold a creed

With beauty such as thine.

From wave and star and flower

Some effluence rare

Was lent thee, a divine but transient dower:

Thou yield’st it back from eyes and lips and hair

To wave and star and flower.

Shouldst thou to-morrow die,

Thou still shalt be

Found in the rose and met in all the sky:

And from the ocean’s heart shalt sing to me,

Shouldst thou to-morrow die.