English

You are mine ... you are mine ... you are mine ...
This is my fierce chant at night,
This is my savage cry.

Naked, you are mine,
And all in the sweet wonder of clothes, you are mine ...
I take you with a rough tenderness: I own you:
I devour your beauty and your body and the wild lights of your star-soul ...
You are woman, a man's morsel ...

And you moan with delight to be enslaved, to be owned, to be devoured ...
You pass into me, flame and incense of the ancient sacrifice,

And when I heard that voice
Which seemed like the ghost of a wisp of bemooned vapour,
Like the echo of the starlight,
Like twined laughter and yearning descending through a phantom of sorrow,
And which was love in pain before a god and a child in the beloved's soul,
Then there was no other music for me, no, none other,
And my soul, shut from her soul, forever, forever,
Must hunt forever the mystery where that music hides ...

And when that song, like the drip of honey in a dream,
Is mine in a quick moment of shaken chance,

Now Golden Bird,
Sleepless for warbling,
Sits in the warm dark beneath my eyelids.

Golden Bird, Golden Bird, my soul,
When you were a maiden in the evening in the starlight,
And I brushed your lips with adoring,
The dark was like light about us,
Like gliding shuttles of golden light ...

What could I do, Beautiful,
But take you deep in the folds of my ghost
Where you sang all night long?

O Golden Bird,
Sleepless for warbling,
You are sitting behind shut eyes in the warm dark.

Lily-of-the-valley
You have made some old moon-city fragrant, fragrant,
Till her still streets call with elusive perfume,
And her shadows twist, sanded golden through whimpering oleanders,
And one great echo of heaven breaks in silver splinters in the dreams of the sleepers of the city ...

Now is the hour of the great desertion: refugee hour of lily-bright dreams ...
The sea of the streets of the sun-city
Empties through windows and prison-bars of the moon-city ...
Down empty pavements nothing is afoot save crime and love ...

You are not as other maidens,
Wild Rose,
Nor as the women whose darkness like a cloud enwombs the future ...
No, you are not the mystery through which the children toil down from the Eternal,
Nor Earth of the mellow udders for the lips of babes ...

Flesh goes through flesh in that procession which like the sun shines between two darknesses,
But where is your mortal mother, O Bird, O Golden, Golden Bird?
Rather your mother was the deep still pool where only the forest sings cradle-song, sings lullaby,

O the wild rose!
Star of the pastures, sea-girl, sun-child,
Rose of the rocks!

Blue seas break in my heart and sun-waters drench the shores of my spirit ...
You are gone, Great Mother of the Stars, Universe-Mother, you are gone ...
The world is my sea-eyed Sister with the pale pink-petal'd cheeks ...
Sea and headland and wind-lit woods are the beautiful maiden ...
Wild-rose World, world of the sun-magic, world of the maddening body ...

Wild-Rose, beloved, I am snared, I am taken in a net ...
When was I not the slave of beauty,

You have come on me like a head streaming fire in the November blackness,
Comet of madness and miracle,
Out of the Deeps, the Deeps beyond the stars ...

They knew you, O dancer with the flaming scarf,
Spangling Assyrian midnight ... cymbals clashed, anklets tinkled ...
You burned with beauty into the souls of men ...

The Nile knew you as you walked in the courts of your massive home,
O slender and large-eyed maiden,
A tiger at your right hand, and a leopard at your left ...

Is it on a coast of my soul
That galleons out of Greece are beaching the beautiful gods
And Nausicaa is willowy on the seashore?

Why do you gaze seaward, sister draped in drifting blue?
Is the Wanderer gone, sailing the seas for home?
Your Wanderer, is he gone?

The white wave curls singing on the shore among the pebbles,
The white nymphs dance and sing: something about dark Helen,
Something about dark Helen ...

Spell of Apollo brightens and burns my spirit ...
O my soul, opening in the sunrise that is Greece,

I will fight for my land,
I will work for my land,
Will it foster with love, in my faith, in my child.
I will eke every gain,
I will seek boot for bane,
From its easternmost bound to the western sea wild.


Here is sunshine enough,
Here is seed-earth enough,
If by us, if by us all love's duty were done.
Here is will to create;
Though our burdens be great,
We can lift up our land, if we all lift as one.


In the past we went wide
O'er the sea's surging tide,

Day's coming up now, joy's returned,
Sorrow's dark cloud-castles captured and burned;
Over the mountain-tops glowing
Light-king his armies is throwing.
" Up now, up now! " calls the bird,
" Up now, up now! " child-voice heard,
Up now my hope in sunshine.