The Analysis of Love
1
I would have my own vision
The world's vision:
The beauty settled in my mind
A lamp in a busy street.
Yet these activities are too intimate,
Made for a solitary sense:
However builded the emotion
The imagination's mute.
Could voice join mind's eye and scream
Its vision out
Then the world would halt its toil
Passionless, time unreal.
2
I see black branches bend
In leafy towers;
For trees like men have skeletons
And temporal bodies of green flesh.
My capillaries disperse
A dense foliage of cells.
She enters my red shade like a woodpecker
Fluttering against me with spread wings.
Up and down my galled trunk
She travels with a petulant bill
And satiate sings
In the moist shadow of my intricate heart.
3
Night palliates
The ragged ridge of things;
The stars, however minute, are intense
And pierce beyond the reckoning brain.
The stars and the dark palliation
Are not indwelling
When driven lust has dark dominion
In the mind's eclipse.
Yet sleep is relentless, extinguishing all
Under its cone of annihilation;
And in the fresh and cool morning
The lusting man is lost.
4
And lust is a finite thing
Deftly to be sized by the passionless mind
Lust gone, other elements exist
Wrought in the body's being.
The measuring mind can appraise
An earthen grace;
The idiot's chatter
Analyses into experience.
But your appeal is imperceptible
As ultimate atoms
And the fast matrix
Of all within the human universe.
5
In vain I have searched the visible earth
For any symbol of our love:
Doves, elephants and Abelards
Have seemed too empty of our mood.
They are too finite in their wooing
Linked by ambitious bonds:
I court you in the commonplace
And a wonder is in our path.
Rather we are like a plant's cells
Invisibly one;
Or the silicious crystal built
When the heart of a mountain cools.
6
There are moments when I see your mind
Laps'd in your sex;
When one particular deployment
Is the reflex of incomplete attainment.
These moments vanish
Like lamps at daybreak:
The wide and even light
Is kind and real.
And then you are universal;
I too: our minds,
Not cramp'd by figured thought
Unite in the impersonal beauty we possess.
7
Since you are finite you will never find
The hidden source of the mind's emotion;
It is a pool, secret in dusk and dawn,
Deep in the chartless forest life has grown.
Since you are blind you do not see
The thirsting beasts peer from gnarled roots
And creep to the brink, at noon,
To lap with rough tongues, rippling the burnish'd serenity.
— This mind which is collected
From many tricklings, of dew and rain,
Of which you are the chief
And freshest in its depths.
8
You will not drive me to the anguish of love
By any torture of this faith,
Converting to the corrupted semblance of despair
The still evidence of my look;
But by the triumph of those traits —
Their multiplication to excess —
Which marks the frailties germinant
In a mind emotion-bound.
Not that I fear your capture
In human littlenesses;
These are drops we can absorb
In the fount and flow of a passionless mood.
9
The teas'd fibrils of reason
Weave vainly to dam
Some bank against the giant flood
Of this emotion.
Waves' and winds' erosion
Crumbles granitic cliffs,
Æonly obliterating
The earth's known visage.
The multiple striving of the human race
Wins slowly mind's conquest
Of brutal foes; or is the supreme foe
This hope, deluding?
10
When you have totalled this life
And got the vision complete:
When you have seen a central horror
Blacking out the sun's gift —
Take me: englobe my soul
And spin it on an axis;
Set about me ring'd planets
And diverse atmospheres.
And in that world
Lacking the imperfections of this
Live boldly, plant sapling trees
Expecting a burden of fruit.
11
These gnarled trunks
Represent no torture
Or maim of sentient life
But are the evidence of unfelt endurance.
Know too that we
As we grow old will wear
Faces grotesque with wrinkles
Crowsfeet and sagging flesh.
But do not grieve that you must lose
A supple beauty that I love:
As wind in twisted trees
So life in you will leave appeal.
12
You will say that I am in the scheme of things
A unit in the crumbling earth;
Trees are barren:
Chance I'm a barren tree.
Link me with circumstances if you must
But live to triumph all the same:
We'll be insensate when the whirl
Of circumstance is past.
You'll not avoid the avalanche
But parasitic on my soul
Run, beat, rebound and throb
In world descent.
13
Nature has perpetual tears
In drooping boughs
And everywhere inanimate death
Is immemorial.
But I have naught that will express
The grief I feel
When men and moods combine to show
The end of this —
This mental ecstasy all spent
In disuniting death
And the years that spread
Oblivion on our zest.
I would have my own vision
The world's vision:
The beauty settled in my mind
A lamp in a busy street.
Yet these activities are too intimate,
Made for a solitary sense:
However builded the emotion
The imagination's mute.
Could voice join mind's eye and scream
Its vision out
Then the world would halt its toil
Passionless, time unreal.
2
I see black branches bend
In leafy towers;
For trees like men have skeletons
And temporal bodies of green flesh.
My capillaries disperse
A dense foliage of cells.
She enters my red shade like a woodpecker
Fluttering against me with spread wings.
Up and down my galled trunk
She travels with a petulant bill
And satiate sings
In the moist shadow of my intricate heart.
3
Night palliates
The ragged ridge of things;
The stars, however minute, are intense
And pierce beyond the reckoning brain.
The stars and the dark palliation
Are not indwelling
When driven lust has dark dominion
In the mind's eclipse.
Yet sleep is relentless, extinguishing all
Under its cone of annihilation;
And in the fresh and cool morning
The lusting man is lost.
4
And lust is a finite thing
Deftly to be sized by the passionless mind
Lust gone, other elements exist
Wrought in the body's being.
The measuring mind can appraise
An earthen grace;
The idiot's chatter
Analyses into experience.
But your appeal is imperceptible
As ultimate atoms
And the fast matrix
Of all within the human universe.
5
In vain I have searched the visible earth
For any symbol of our love:
Doves, elephants and Abelards
Have seemed too empty of our mood.
They are too finite in their wooing
Linked by ambitious bonds:
I court you in the commonplace
And a wonder is in our path.
Rather we are like a plant's cells
Invisibly one;
Or the silicious crystal built
When the heart of a mountain cools.
6
There are moments when I see your mind
Laps'd in your sex;
When one particular deployment
Is the reflex of incomplete attainment.
These moments vanish
Like lamps at daybreak:
The wide and even light
Is kind and real.
And then you are universal;
I too: our minds,
Not cramp'd by figured thought
Unite in the impersonal beauty we possess.
7
Since you are finite you will never find
The hidden source of the mind's emotion;
It is a pool, secret in dusk and dawn,
Deep in the chartless forest life has grown.
Since you are blind you do not see
The thirsting beasts peer from gnarled roots
And creep to the brink, at noon,
To lap with rough tongues, rippling the burnish'd serenity.
— This mind which is collected
From many tricklings, of dew and rain,
Of which you are the chief
And freshest in its depths.
8
You will not drive me to the anguish of love
By any torture of this faith,
Converting to the corrupted semblance of despair
The still evidence of my look;
But by the triumph of those traits —
Their multiplication to excess —
Which marks the frailties germinant
In a mind emotion-bound.
Not that I fear your capture
In human littlenesses;
These are drops we can absorb
In the fount and flow of a passionless mood.
9
The teas'd fibrils of reason
Weave vainly to dam
Some bank against the giant flood
Of this emotion.
Waves' and winds' erosion
Crumbles granitic cliffs,
Æonly obliterating
The earth's known visage.
The multiple striving of the human race
Wins slowly mind's conquest
Of brutal foes; or is the supreme foe
This hope, deluding?
10
When you have totalled this life
And got the vision complete:
When you have seen a central horror
Blacking out the sun's gift —
Take me: englobe my soul
And spin it on an axis;
Set about me ring'd planets
And diverse atmospheres.
And in that world
Lacking the imperfections of this
Live boldly, plant sapling trees
Expecting a burden of fruit.
11
These gnarled trunks
Represent no torture
Or maim of sentient life
But are the evidence of unfelt endurance.
Know too that we
As we grow old will wear
Faces grotesque with wrinkles
Crowsfeet and sagging flesh.
But do not grieve that you must lose
A supple beauty that I love:
As wind in twisted trees
So life in you will leave appeal.
12
You will say that I am in the scheme of things
A unit in the crumbling earth;
Trees are barren:
Chance I'm a barren tree.
Link me with circumstances if you must
But live to triumph all the same:
We'll be insensate when the whirl
Of circumstance is past.
You'll not avoid the avalanche
But parasitic on my soul
Run, beat, rebound and throb
In world descent.
13
Nature has perpetual tears
In drooping boughs
And everywhere inanimate death
Is immemorial.
But I have naught that will express
The grief I feel
When men and moods combine to show
The end of this —
This mental ecstasy all spent
In disuniting death
And the years that spread
Oblivion on our zest.
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