I WILL give you all my keys,

  You shall be my châtelaine,

You shall enter as you please,

  As you please shall go again.

When I hear you jingling through         5

  All the chambers of my soul,

How I sit and laugh at you

  In your vain housekeeping rôle.

Jealous of the smallest cover,

  Angry at the simpler door;        10

Well, you anxious, inquisitive lover,

  Are you pleased with what’s in store?

You have fingered all my treasures,

  Have you not, most curiously,

Handled all my tools and measures        15

  And masculine machinery?

Over every single beauty

  You have had your little rapture;

You have slain, as was your duty,

  Every sin-mouse you could capture.        20

Still you are not satisfied,

  Still you tremble faint reproach; 

Challenge me I keep aside

  Secrets that you may not broach.

Maybe yes, and maybe no,        25

  Maybe there are secret places,

Altars barbarous below,

  Elsewhere halls of high disgraces.

Maybe yes, and maybe no,

  You may have it as you please,        30

Since I choose to keep you so,

  Suppliant on your curious knees.

THE QUICK sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping,

Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame;

Above them, exultant, the pee-wits are sweeping:

They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim.

Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie

   5

Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick.

Are they asleep?—Are they alive?—Now see, when I

Move my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick.

The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes

Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes;

  10

There the lazy streamlet pushes

Its curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes.

Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip,

Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow,

Naked on the steep, soft lip

  15

Of the bank I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro.

What if the gorse flowers shrivelled and kissing were lost?

Without the pulsing waters, where were the marigolds and the songs of the brook?

If my veins and my breasts with love embossed

Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took.

  20

So my soul like a passionate woman turns,

Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love

For myself in my own eyes’ laughter burns,

Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my belly from the breast-lights above.

Over my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air,

  25

Rich with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad.

And the soul of the wind and my blood compare

Their wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in liberty, drifts on and is sad.

Oh but the water loves me and folds me,

Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as though it were living blood,

  30

Blood of a heaving woman who holds me,

Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good.

SOMEWHERE the long mellow note of the blackbird

Quickens the unclasping hands of hazel,

Somewhere the wind-flowers fling their heads back,

Stirred by an impetuous wind. Some ways’ll

All be sweet with white and blue violet.         5

    (Hush now, hush. Where am I?—Biuret—)

On the green wood’s edge a shy girl hovers

From out of the hazel-screen on to the grass,

Where wheeling and screaming the petulant plovers

Wave frighted. Who comes? A labourer, alas!        10

Oh the sunset swims in her eyes’ swift pool.

    (Work, work, you fool——!)

Somewhere the lamp hanging low from the ceiling

Lights the soft hair of a girl as she reads,

And the red firelight steadily wheeling        15

Weaves the hard hands of my friend in sleep.

And the white dog snuffs the warmth, appealing

For the man to heed lest the girl shall weep.

    (Tears and dreams for them; for me

    Bitter science—the exams are near.        20

    I wish I bore it more patiently.

    I wish you did not wait, my dear,

    For me to come: since work I must:

    Though it’s all the same when we are dead.—

    I wish I was only a bust,        25

        All head.)

OUTSIDE the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips,

And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree

Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship’s

Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously.

Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender lash         5

Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound

Of a thick lash booming and bruising, until it drowned

The other voice in a silence of blood, ’neath the noise of the ash.

NOW and again

All my body springs alive,

And the life that is polarised in my eyes,

That quivers between my eyes and mouth,

Flies like a wild thing across my body,         5

Leaving my eyes half-empty, and clamorous,

Filling my still breasts with a flush and a flame,

Gathering the soft ripples below my breasts

Into urgent, passionate waves,

And my soft, slumbering belly        10

Quivering awake with one impulse of desire,

Gathers itself fiercely together;

And my docile, fluent arms

Knotting themselves with wild strength

To clasp—what they have never clasped.        15

Then I tremble, and go trembling

Under the wild, strange tyranny of my body,

Till it has spent itself,

And the relentless nodality of my eyes reasserts itself,

Till the bursten flood of life ebbs back to my eyes,        20

Back from my beautiful, lonely body

Tired and unsatisfied.

THIS is the last of all, this is the last!

I must hold my hands, and turn my face to the fire,

I must watch my dead days fusing together in dross,

Shape after shape, and scene after scene from my past

Fusing to one dead mass in the sinking fire         5

Where the ash on the dying coals grows swiftly, like heavy moss.

Strange he is, my son, whom I have awaited like a loyer,

Strange to me like a captive in a foreign country, haunting

The confines and gazing out on the land where the wind is free;

White and gaunt, with wistful eyes that hover        10

Always on the distance, as if his soul were chaunting

The monotonous weird of departure away from me.

Like a strange white bird blown out of the frozen seas,

Like a bird from the far north blown with a broken wing

Into our sooty garden, he drags and beats        15

From place to place perpetually, seeking release

From me, from the hand of my love which creeps up, needing

His happiness, whilst he in displeasure retreats.

I must look away from him, for my faded eyes

Like a cringing dog at his heels offend him now,        20

Like a toothless hound pursuing him with my will,

Till he chafes at my crouching persistence, and a sharp spark flies

In my soul from under the sudden frown of his brow,

As he blenches and turns away, and my heart stands still.

This is the last, it will not be any more.        25

All my life I have borne the burden of myself,

All the long years of sitting in my husband’s house,

Never have I said to myself as he closed the door:

“Now I am caught!—You are hopelessly lost, O Self,

You are frightened with joy, my heart, like a frightened mouse.”        30

Three times have I offered myself, three times rejected.

It will not be any more. No more, my son, my son!

Never to know the glad freedom of obedience, since long ago

The angel of childhood kissed me and went. I expected

Another would take me,—and now, my son, O my son,        35

I must sit awhile and wait, and never know

The loss of myself, till death comes, who cannot fail.

Death, in whose service is nothing of gladness, takes me:

For the lips and the eyes of God are behind a veil.

And the thought of the lipless voice of the Father shakes me        40

With fear, and fills my eyes with the tears of desire,

And my heart rebels with anguish as night draws nigher.

SEE the stars, love,

In the water much clearer and brighter

Than those above us, and whiter,

Like nenuphars.

Star-shadows shine, love,         5

How many stars in your bowl?

How many shadows in your soul,

Only mine, love, mine?

When I move the oars, love,

See how the stars are tossed,        10

Distorted, the brightest lost.

—So that bright one of yours, love.

The poor waters spill

The stars, waters broken, forsaken.

—The heavens are not shaken, you say, love,        15

Its stars stand still.

There, did you see

That spark fly up at us; even

Stars are not safe in heaven.

—What of yours, then, love, yours?        20

What then, love, if soon

Your light be tossed over a wave?

Will you count the darkness a grave,

And swoon, love, swoon?

THE FIVE old bells

Are hurrying and eagerly calling,

Imploring, protesting

They know, but clamorously falling

Into gabbling incoherence, never resting,         5

Like spattering showers from a bursten sky-rocket dropping

In splashes of sound, endlessly, never stopping.

The silver moon

That somebody has spun so high

To settle the question, yes or no, has caught        10

In the net of the night’s balloon,

And sits with a smooth bland smile up there in the sky

Smiling at naught,

Unless the winking star that keeps her company

Makes little jests at the bells’ insanity,        15

As if he knew aught!

The patient Night

Sits indifferent, hugged in her rags,

She neither knows nor cares

Why the old church sobs and brags;        20

The light distresses her eyes, and tears

Her old blue cloak, as she crouches and covers her face,

Smiling, perhaps, if we knew it, at the bells’ loud clattering disgrace.

The wise old trees

Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt,        25

While a car at the end of the street goes by with a laugh;

As by degrees

The poor bells cease, and the Night is exempt,

And the stars can chaff

The ironic moon at their ease, while the dim old church        30

Is peopled with shadows and sounds and ghosts that lurch

In its cenotaph.

ALWAYS, sweetheart,

Carry into your room the blossoming boughs of cherry,

Almond and apple and pear diffuse with light, that very

Soon strews itself on the floor; and keep the radiance of spring

Fresh quivering; keep the sunny-swift March-days waiting         5

In a little throng at your door, and admit the one who is plaiting

Her hair for womanhood, and play awhile with her, then bid her depart.

    A come and go of March-day loves

    Through the flower-vine, trailing screen;

      A fluttering in of doves.        10

    Then a launch abroad of shrinking doves

    Over the waste where no hope is seen

    Of open hands:

      Dance in and out

Small-bosomed girls of the spring of love,        15

With a bubble of laughter, and shrilly shout

Of mirth; then the dripping of tears on your glove.

I HAVE opened the window to warm my hands on the sill

Where the sunlight soaks in the stone: the afternoon

Is full of dreams, my love, the boys are all still

In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone.

The clink of the shunting engines is sharp and fine,         5

Like savage music striking far off, and there

On the great, uplifted blue palace, lights stir and shine

Where the glass is domed in the blue, soft air.

There lies the world, my darling, full of wonder and wistfulness and strange

Recognition and greetings of half-acquaint things, as I greet the cloud        10

Of blue palace aloft there, among misty indefinite dreams that range

At the back of my life’s horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.

Over the nearness of Norwood Hill, through the mellow veil

Of the afternoon glows to me the old romance of David and Dora,

With the old, sweet, soothing tears, and laughter that shakes the sail        15

Of the ship of the soul over seas where dreamed dreams lure the unoceaned explorer.

All the bygone, hushèd years

Streaming back where the mist distils

Into forgetfulness: soft-sailing waters where fears

No longer shake, where the silk sail fills        20

With an unfelt breeze that ebbs over the seas, where the storm

Of living has passed, on and on

Through the coloured iridescence that swims in the warm

Wake of the tumult now spent and gone,

Drifts my boat, wistfully lapsing after        25

The mists of vanishing tears and the echo of laughter.

MY world is a painted fresco, where coloured shapes

Of old, ineffectual lives linger blurred and warm;

An endless tapestry the past has women drapes

The halls of my life, compelling my soul to conform.

The surface of dreams is broken,         5

The picture of the past is shaken and scattered.

Fluent, active figures of men pass along the railway, and I am woken

From the dreams that the distance flattered.

Along the railway, active figures of men.

They have a secret that stirs in their limbs as they move        10

Out of the distance, nearer, commanding my dreamy world.

Here in the subtle, rounded flesh

Beats the active ecstasy.

In the sudden lifting my eyes, it is clearer,

The fascination of the quick, restless Creator moving through the mesh        15

Of men, vibrating in ecstasy through the rounded flesh.

Oh my boys, bending over your books,

In you is trembling and fusing

The creation of a new-patterned dream, dream of a generation:

And I watch to see the Creator, the power that patterns the dream.        20

The old dreams are beautiful, beloved, soft-toned, and sure,

But the dream-stuff is molten and moving mysteriously,

Alluring my eyes; for I, am I not also dream-stuff,

Am I not quickening, diffusing myself in the pattern, shaping and shapen?

Here in my class is the answer for the great yearning:        25

Eyes where I can watch the swim of old dreams reflected on the molten metal of dreams,

Watch the stir which is rhythmic and moves them all as a heart-beat moves the blood,

Here in the swelling flesh the great activity working,

Visible there in the change of eyes and the mobile features.

Oh the great mystery and fascination of the unseen Shaper,        30

The power of the melting, fusing Force—heat, light, all in one,

Everything great and mysterious in one, swelling and shaping the dream in the flesh,

As it swells and shapes a bud into blossom.

Oh the terrible ecstasy of the consciousness that I am life!

Oh the miracle of the whole, the widespread, labouring concentration        35

Swelling mankind like one bud to bring forth the fruit of a dream,

Oh the terror of lifting the innermost I out of the sweep of the impulse of life,

And watching the great Thing labouring through the whole round flesh of the world;

And striving to catch a glimpse of the shape of the coming dream,

As it quickens within the labouring, white-hot metal,        40

Catch the scent and the colour of the coming dream,

Then to fall back exhausted into the unconscious, molten life!

YESTERDAY the fields were only grey with scattered snow,

And now the longest grass-leaves hardly emerge;

Yet her deep footsteps mark the snow, and go

On towards the pines at the hills’ white verge.

I cannot see her, since the mist’s white scarf         5

Obscures the dark wood and the dull orange sky;

But she’s waiting, I know, impatient and cold, half

Sobs struggling into her frosty sigh.

Why does she come so promptly, when she must know

That she’s only the nearer to the inevitable farewell;        10

The hill is steep, on the snow my steps are slow—

Why does she come, when she knows what I have to tell?

PATIENCE, little Heart.

One day a heavy, June-hot woman

Will enter and shut the door to stay.

And when your stifling heart would summon

Cool, lonely night, her roused breasts will keep the night at bay,         5

Sitting in your room like two tiger-lilies

Flaming on after sunset,

Destroying the cool, lonely night with the glow of their hot twilight;

There in the morning, still, while the fierce strange scent comes yet

Stronger, hot and red; till you thirst for the daffodillies        10

With an anguished, husky thirst that you cannot assuage,

When the daffodillies are dead, and a woman of the dog-days holds you in gage.

Patience, little Heart.

WHEN the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass

The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind,

They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water;

And the sight of their white play among the grass

Is like a little robin’s song, winsome,         5

Or as two white butterflies settle in the cup of one flower

For a moment, then away with a flutter of wings.

I long for the baby to wander hither to me

Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water,

So that she can stand on my knee        10

With her little bare feet in my hands,

Cool like syringa buds,

Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers.

IT is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to the pane,

The thin sycamores in the playground are swinging with flattened leaves;

The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow gloom that stains

The class; over them all the dark net of my discipline weaves.

It is no good, dear, gentleness and forbearance, I endured too long:         5

I have pushed my hands in the dark soil, under the flower of my soul

And the gentle leaves, and have felt where the roots are strong

Fixed in the darkness, grappling for the deep soil’s little control.

And there is the dark, my darling, where the roots are entangled and fight

Each one for its hold on the oblivious darkness, I know that there        10

In the night where we first have being, before we rise on the light,

We are not brothers, my darling, we fight and we do not spare.

And in the original dark the roots cannot keep, cannot know

Any communion whatever, but they bind themselves on to the dark,

And drawing the darkness together, crush from it a twilight, a slow        15

Burning that breaks at last into leaves and a flower’s bright spark.

I came to the boys with love, my dear, but they turned on me;

I came with gentleness, with my heart ’twixt my hands like a bowl,

Like a loving-cup, like a grail, but they spilt it triumphantly

And tried to break the vessel, and to violate my soul.        20

But what have I to do with the boys, deep down in my soul, my love?

I throw from out of the darkness my self like a flower into sight,

Like a flower from out of the night-time, I lift my face, and those

Who will may warm their hands at me, comfort this night.

But whosoever would pluck apart my flowering shall burn their hands,        25

So flowers are tender folk, and roots can only hide,

Yet my flowerings of love are a fire, and the scarlet brands

Of my love are roses to look at, but flames to chide.

But comfort me, my love, now the fires are low,

Now I am broken to earth like a winter destroyed, and all        30

Myself but a knowledge of roots, of roots in the dark that throw

A net on the undersoil, which lies passive beneath their thrall.

But comfort me, for henceforth my love is yours alone,

To you alone will I offer the bowl, to you will I give

My essence only, but love me, and I will atone        35

To you for my general loving, atone as long as I live.

A FAINT, sickening scent of irises

Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table

A fine proud spike of purple irises

Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable

To see the class’s lifted and bended faces         5

Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and sable.

I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless

Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast you

With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your chin as you dipped

Your face in the marigold bunch, to touch and contrast you,        10

Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-smocks,

Dissolved on the golden sorcery you should not outlast.

You amid the bog-end’s yellow incantation,

You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above,

Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs,        15

Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love;

You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent,

You with your face all rich, like the sheen of a dove.

You are always asking, do I remember, remember

The butter-cup bog-end where the flowers rose up        20

And kindled you over deep with a cast of gold?

You ask again, do the healing days close up

The open darkness which then drew us in,

The dark which then drank up our brimming cup.

You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of night        25

Burnt like a sacrifice; you invisible;

Only the fire of darkness, and the scent of you!

—And yes, thank God, it still is possible

The healing days shall close the darkness up

Wherein we fainted like a smoke or dew.        30

Like vapour, dew, or poison. Now, thank God,

The fire of night is gone, and your face is ash

Indistinguishable on the grey, chill day;

The night had burst us out, at last the good

Dark fire burns on untroubled, without clash        35

Of you upon the dead leaves saying me Yea.

AH, my darling, when over the purple horizon shall loom

The shrouded mother of a new idea, men hide their faces,

Cry out and fend her off, as she seeks her procreant groom,

Wounding themselves against her, denying her fecund embraces.

YOURS is the shame and sorrow

  But the disgrace is mine;

Your love was dark and thorough,

Mine was the love of the sun for a flower

  He creates with his shine.         5

I was diligent to explore you,

  Blossom you stalk by stalk,

Till my fire of creation bore you

Shrivelling down in the final dour

  Anguish—then I suffered a balk.        10

I knew your pain, and it broke

  My fine, craftsman’s nerve;

Your body quailed at my stroke,

And my courage failed to give you the last

  Fine torture you did deserve.        15

You are shapely, you are adorned,

  But opaque and dull in the flesh,

Who, had I but pierced with the thorned

Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast

  In a lovely illumined mesh.        20

Like a painted window: the best

  Suffering burnt through your flesh,

Undrossed it and left it blest

With a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but now

  Who shall take you afresh?        25

Now who will burn you free

  From your body’s terrors and dross,

Since the fire has failed in me?

What man will stoop in your flesh to plough

  The shrieking cross?        30

A mute, nearly beautiful thing

  Is your face, that fills me with shame

As I see it hardening,

Warping the perfect image of God,

  And darkening my eternal fame.        35

NOW I am all

One bowl of kisses,

Such as the tall

Slim votaresses

Of Egypt filled         5

For a God’s excesses.

I lift to you

My bowl of kisses,

And through the temple’s

Blue recesses        10

Cry out to you

In wild caresses.

And to my lips’

Bright crimson rim

The passion slips,        15

And down my slim

White body drips

The shining hymn.