I have known you, I have loved you, I have lost. Here in one woman I have found the host Of women, and the woman of all these Who by her strangeness had the power to please The strangeness of my difficult desires; And here the only love that never tires Even with the monotony of love. It was your strangeness I was amorous of, Mystery of variety, that, being known, yet does Leave you still infinitely various, And leave me thirsting still, still wondering At your unknowable and disquieting Certainty of a fixed uncertainty. And thus I knew that you were made for me, For I have always hated to be sure, And there is nothing I could less endure Than a fond woman whom I understood. I never understood you: mood by mood I watched you through your changes manifold, As the star-gazing shepherd from his fold Watches the myriad changes of the moon. Is not love's mystery the supreme boon? Ah rare, scarce hoped-for, longed for, such a goal As this most secret and alluring soul! Your soul I never knew, I guessed at it, A dim abode of what indefinite And of what poisonous possibilities! Your soul has been a terror to my eyes, Even as my own soul haunts me, night and day, With voices that I cannot drive away, And visions that I scarce can see and live. And you, from your own soul a fugitive, Have you not fled, did not your pride disown The coming of a soul so like your own, Eyes that you fancied read you, yet but drew Unknown affinities, yourself from you, And hands that held your destiny, because The power that held you in them, yours it was? Did you not hate me, did you not in vain Avoid me and repel me and refrain? Was not our love fatal to you and me, The rapture of a tragic ecstasy Between disaster and disaster, given A moment's space, to be a hell in heaven? Love, being love indeed, could be no less, For us, than an immortal bitterness, A blindness and a madness, and the wave Of a great sea that breaks and is a grave. Ah, more to us than many prosperous years, So brief a rapture and so many tears; To have won, amid the tumults round about, The shade of a great silence from the shout Of the world's battles and the idle cry Of those vain faiths for which men live and die! And have we not tasted the very peace So passionate an escape must needs release, Being from the world so strangely set apart, The inmost peace that is the whirlpool's heart? | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...UNGRATEFULNESS by GEORGE HERBERT SONNET: 21. TO CYRIACK SKINNER by JOHN MILTON WOMAN'S WILL by JOHN GODFREY SAXE THE CASE OF EDGAR ABBOTT AND PHILIP RIDD by FRANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS THE MAPLE TREE OVER THE WAY by LEVI BISHOP TO K. H. by THOMAS EDWARD BROWN |