Hyacinth

YOUR anger charms me, and yet all the time I think of chaste, slight hands, veined snow; snow craters filled with first wild-flowerlets; glow of ice-gentian, whitest violet; snow craters and the ice ridge spilling light; dawn and the lover chaste dawn leaves bereft— I think of these and snow-cooled Phrygian wine. Your anger charms me subtly and I know that you would take the still hands where I’d rest; you would despoil for very joy of theft; list, lady, I would give you one last hint: quench your red mouth in some cold forest lake, cover your russet locks with arum leaf, quench out the colour, still the fevered glance, cover your want, your fire insatiate, I can not match your fervour, nay, nor still my ache with any but white hands inviolate.

Take the red spoil of grape and pomegranate, the red camellia, the most, most red rose; take all the garden spills, inveterate, prodigal spender just as summer goes, the red scales of the deep in-folded spice, the Indian, Persian and the Syrian pink, their scent undaunted even in that faint, unmistakable fragrance of the late tuberose, (heavy its petals, eye-lids of dark eyes that open languorous and more languorous close—the east, further than scent of our wind-smitten isle,) take these: O lady, take them, prodigal I cull and offer this and this and these last definite whorls of clustered peonies, the last, the first that stained our stainless ledge of blue and white and the white foam of sea, rocks, and that strait ledge whiter than the rock the Parians break from their enchanted hill; take, lady, but leave me with my weed and shell and those slight, hovering gull-wings that recall silver of far Hymettus’ asphodel.

Take all for you have taken everything, but do not let me see you taking this; Adonis lying spent with Venus’ care, Adonis dying were a lesser ache than this, to have even your slightest breath breathe in the crystal air where he takes breath. Take all for you have taken everything, save the broad ledge of sea which no man takes, take all for you have taken mirth and ease and all the small delights of simple poets, the lilt of rhyme, the sway and lift and fall, the first spring gold your fire has scorched to ash, the fresh winds that go halt where you have passed, the Tyrian iris I so greatly loved, its dark head speared through its wet spray of leaves. Take all, but ah, lady, a fool, a poet may even know when you have taken all: up on the mountain slope one last flower cleaves to the wet marge of ice, the blue of snow, keep all your riot in the swales below, of grape and autumn, take all, taking these, for you and autumn yet can not prevail against that flame, that flower, (ice, spark or jewel,) the cyclamen, parting its white cyclamen leaves.

O, I am ill with dust as you with stain, O, I am worthless, weary, world-bedragged, nevertheless to mountains still the rain falls on the tangle of dead under-brush, freshens the loam, the earth and broken leaves for that hoar-frost of later star or flower, the fragile host of Greek anemones. Say I am little meet to call the youth, say I have little magic to enchant, but is that reason why your flaring will should sweep and scorch, should lap and seethe and fill with last red flame the tender ditch and runnel which the spring freshet soon must fill again? White violets have no place on your hot brow; how can I bring you what the spring must bring? what can I offer? lush and heady mallow? the fire-grass or the serpent-spotted fire-flower? O take them, for I stand a ruinous cloud between you and the chaste uplifted hill. O take them swiftly and more swiftly go, for spring is distant yet, for spring is far; you have your tense, short space of blazing sun, your melons, vines, your terraces of fruit; now all you have, all, all I gladly give who long but for the ridge, the crest and hollow, the lift and fall, the reach and distant ledge of the sun-smitten, wind-indented snow.