Classic Poem

Passive, and yet it is not passive.
There is no word to tell that droop of the head,
That turned-away rapt face, those outstretched arms:
Relinquishment, as of a woman yielding her body to love;
To the embrace of him she may nowise refuse;
Whose weakness, whose evil, whose un-love she sees,
But takes not back her faith;
Letting his will upon her be as her own will
To its utmost of asking;
Remembering — knowing as he cannot know —
The ends, the issues of love,
Yet without refusal of life or of death:
So now on this drooping one blind vigors and lusts beget
Blindly the far undreamed, new perfect birth.
Oh, more than any power
Is the exceeding patience of that yielding,
The sufferance of those spread arms of love.