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, Since I choose to keep you so, Suppliant on your curious knees.

The Wild Common

Table of Contents

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

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;

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

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.

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

Скачать книгу