Caroline Branson

With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked,         As often before, the April fields till star - light         Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness         Under the cliff, our trysting place in the wood,         Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing         Like notes of music that run together, into winning,         In the inspired improvisation of love!         But to put back of us as a canticle ended         The rapt enchantment of the flesh,         In which our souls swooned, down, down,         Where time was not, nor space, nor ourselves -         Annihilated in love!         To leave these behind for a room with lamps:         And to stand with our Secret mocking itself,         And hiding itself amid flowers and mandolins,         Stared at by all between salad and coffee.         And to see him tremble, and feel myself         Prescient, as one who signs a bond -         Not flaming with gifts and pledges heaped         With rosy hands over his brow.         And then, O night! deliberate! unlovely!         With all of our wooing blotted out by the winning,         In a chosen room in an hour that was known to all!         Next day he sat so listless, almost cold         So strangely changed, wondering why I wept,         Till a kind of sick despair and voluptuous madness         Seized us to make the pact of death.         A stalk of the earth-sphere,         Frail as star-light;         Waiting to be drawn once again Into creation's stream.         But next time to be given birth         Gazed at by Raphael and St. Francis         Sometimes as they pass.         For I am their little brother,         To be known clearly face to face         Through a cycle of birth hereafter run.         You may know the seed and the soil;         You may feel the cold rain fall,         But only the earth - sphere, only heaven         Knows the secret of the seed         In the nuptial chamber under the soil.         Throw me into the stream again,         Give me another trial -         Save me, Shelley!