1247 Love poems

Who will in fairest book of nature know How virtue may best lodg'd in beauty be, Let him but learn of love to read in thee, Stella, those fair lines which true goodness show. There shall he find all vices' overthrow, Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty Of reason, from whose light those night-birds fly; That inward sun in thine eyes shineth so. And, not content to be perfection's heir Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move, Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair. So while thy beauty draws thy heart to love, As fast thy virtue bends that love to good: But "Ah," Desire still cries, "Give me some food!"

Desire, though thou my old companion art, And oft so clings to my pure Love that I One from the other scarcely can descry, While each doth blow the fire of my heart, Now from thy fellowship I needs must part; Venus is taught with Dian’s wings to fly; I must no more in thy sweet passions lie; Virtue’s gold now must head my Cupid’s dart. Service and honor, wonder with delight, Fear to offend, will worthy to appear, Care shining in mine eyes, faith in my sprite: These things are let me by my only dear; But thou, Desire, because thou wouldst have all, Now banished art. But yet alas how shall?

Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be, And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet More oft than to a chamber melody. Now, blessed you bear onward blessed me To her, where I my heart, safe-left, shall meet: My Muse and I must you of duty greet With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. Be you still fair, honour'd by public heed; By no encroachment wrong'd, nor time forgot, Nor blam'd for blood, nor sham'd for sinful deed; And that you know I envy you no lot Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss,i Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss.

Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame, Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee; Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my history; If thou praise not, all other praise is shame. Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame A nest for my young praise in laurel tree: In truth I sweare, I wish not there should be Graved in mine epitaph a Poet’s name: Nay if I would, could I just title make, That any laud to me thereof should grow, Without my plumes from others’ wings I take. For nothing from my wit or will doth flow, Since all my words thy beauty doth endite, And love doth hold my hand, and makes me write.

Be your words made, good sir, of Indian ware, That you allow me them by so small rate? Or do you cutted Spartans imitate? Or do you mean my tender ears to spare, That to my questions you so total are? When I demand of Phoenix Stella's state, You say, forsooth, you left her well of late: O God, think you that satisfies my care? I would know whether she did sit or walk; How cloth'd, how waited on; sigh'd she, or smil'd; Whereof, with whom, how often did she talk; With what pastime time's journey she beguiled; If her lips deign'd to sweeten my poor name. Say all; and all well said, still say the same.

I’m thinking about you and you’re humming while cutting a piece of wood. I’m positive you aren’t thinking about me which is fine as long as you aren’t thinking about yourself. I know and love the way you inhabit this house and the occasions we mutually create. But I don’t know the man you picture when you see yourself walking around the world inside your head and I’m jealous of the attention you pay that person whom I suspect of being devious.

At night on the station platform, near a pile of baskets, a couple em- braced, pressed close together and swaying a little. It was hard to see where the girl’s feet and legs were. The suspicion this aroused soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back, to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout en- gine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgy- nous fantasy, the self-sufficient core of his stupor. Such a romantic thing, so tender, for him to contain. He looked more comic and complaisant than the couple had done, and more likely to fall heav- ily to the floor. A café with a frosted glass door through which much light is dif- fused. A tall young girl comes out and stands in front of it, her face and figure quite obscured by this milky radiance. She treads out onto a lopsided ochre panel of lit pavement before the doorway and becomes visible as a coloured shape, moving sharply. A wrap of honey and ginger, a flared saffron skirt, grey- white shoes. She goes off past the Masonic Temple with a young man: he is pale, with dark hair and a shrunken, earnest face. You could imagine him a size larger. Just for a moment, as it happens, there is no one else in the street at all. Their significance escapes rap- idly like a scent, before the footsteps vanish among the car engines. A man in the police court. He looked dapper and poker-faced, his arms straight, the long fingers just touching the hem of his checked jacket. Four days after being released from the prison where he had served two years for theft he had been discovered at midnight cling- ing like a tree-shrew to the bars of a glass factory-roof. He made no attempt to explain his presence there; the luminous nerves that made him fly up to it were not visible in daylight, and the police seemed hardly able to believe this was the creature they had brought down in the darkness. In this city the governing authority is limited and mean: so limited that it can do no more than preserve a superficial order. It supplies fuel, water and power. It removes a fair proportion of the refuse, cleans the streets after a fashion, and discourages fighting. With these things, and a few more of the same sort, it is content. This could never be a capital city for all its size. There is no mind in it, no regard. The sensitive, the tasteful, the fashionable, the intolerant and powerful, have not moved through it as they have moved through London, evaluating it, altering it deliberately, setting in motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen. In an afternoon of dazzling sunlight in the thronged streets, I saw at first no individuals but a composite monster, its unfeeling sur- faces matted with dust: a mass of necks, limbs without extremities, trunks without heads; unformed stirrings and shovings spilling across the streets it had managed to get itself provided with. Later, as the air cooled, flowing loosely about the buildings that stood starkly among the declining rays, the creature began to divide and multiply. At crossings I could see people made of straws, rags, cartons, the stuffing of burst cushions, kitchen refuse. Outside the Grand Hotel, a long-boned carrot-haired girl with glasses, loping along, and with strips of bright colour, rich, silky green and blue, in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps she was beau- tiful. Faint blue light dropping down through the sparse leaves of the plane trees in the churchyard opposite after sundown, cooling and shaping heads, awakening eyes.

Week upon week at the dorm she watched him working at a table with a pencil in his teeth, eating with a stack of books and papers, reading while he walked. His hair was groups of angry men, his sweaty cuffs were wrinkled at his forearms: he seemed to be loved by no one. But always there were pairs of houseflies hovering above him, landing on his nest of notes, trailing him as if with streamers and sound. A farm girl, she knew to follow the flies: they'll take you to the milk just pulled to the pail, to the cow's haunch where the meat will one day be sweetest, the swelled pond, the unlatched gate. Everything, she knew, was in those notebooks he would carry: her future, the distances of islands, poles and stars, the reason for the network of men's follies, how to spend the night.

Suddenly, I stopped thinking about Love, after so many years of only that, after thinking that nothing else mattered. And what was I thinking of when I stopped thinking about Love? Death, of course—what else could take Love’s place? What else could hold such force? I thought about how far away Death once had seemed, how unexpected that it could happen to someone I knew quite well, how impossible that this should be the normal thing, as natural as frost and winter. I thought about the way we’d aged, how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.

How is your life with that other one? Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars and a long coastline— and the memory of me is soon a drifting island (not in the ocean—in the sky!) Souls—you will be sisters— sisters, not lovers. How is your life with an ordinary woman? without the god inside her? The queen supplanted— How do you breathe now? Flinch, waking up? What do you do, poor man? “Hysterics and interruptions— enough! I’ll rent my own house!” How is your life with that other, you, my own. Is the breakfast delicious? (If you get sick, don’t blame me!) How is it, living with a postcard? You who stood on Sinai. How’s your life with a tourist on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?) is it to your liking? How’s life? Do you cough? Do you hum to drown out the mice in your mind? How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising? How’s kissing plaster-dust? Are you bored with her new body? How’s it going, with an earthly woman, with no sixth sense? Are you happy? No? In a shallow pit—how is your life, my beloved? Hard as mine with another man? 1924