[BNP/E3, 49A4 – 50-52]
What evil planet now or fatal star
Transits the chill midheaven of my despair,
What malefic conjunction is come on
The place of my birth’s sun?
My heart is weary and my cheeks feel pale,
What great arrival at my palace gates
With a heart-grip of horror my soul fates
And makes my thought swerve, back and fail?
What saturnine and martial meeting
Makes my life’s abstract fleeting
A prey to that great terror of the dawn
From fear it shall an evil day look on?
Thus moment must I have more than another
Your soft hands that seem so as of a mother.
Your eyes that that in their holy ardour keep
A pity for such souls as you feel weep,
And your gestures that are
Balus the fever that is called despair.
[50v]
2
I hardly know what thou dost think of me
Nor whether I am anything to thee
In what thou thinkst. But this matter not
Thy presence is a solace physical
For my worn spirit, and my very thought
Of these sits in the shadow and forgets all.
I have no need of love nor care of[1] life
My heart aches from no common human pain.
Subtle though are the knife
That bit by bit sips my felt brain.
Great battles fought by thoughts in a great sight
Are ever with my consciousness and fright
All the young thoughts that youth instals.
Keep me by seem chance before mine eyes.
Rebel not against being in my presence.
[51r]
3
I have so little that is mine! The essence
Of what I wish is so much far, so much
The thoughts I cannot {…} and cannot touch
Mortal things full of strange[2] eternities.
Let thy delight of motion be
The blue horizon of that inner sea
When through the lake of my desires is sad
With being abandoned.
Oh, what a longing like a tide
Eating the gradual walls of my lost hopes,
For my absolute end in silence gropes
And spreads not across towards my consoling pride!
Sweet child that art a woman, {…}
That consolation that comes from thee now
And makes a comment of me feel now human
Than that my central being through alien,
[51v]
4
That casual action cast
Or the wounds of my beaten dreams,
Let it be a balm to make me hope at last
At least that life may fade, like sea-grown streams.
Let me at least, seeing then from a smile,
Balus awhile, value a light while,
That life is not worth thought, nor thought worth pain,
That it is best to look and think of nought
Save a sad release from that sad thought
And that great live of all that is a gain.
Keep in my glance the garden of your being.
Your flowers of gesture and of vice are things
That I can see with real eyes. Soft wings
Pass where I see you in my swinged seeing.
[52r]
5
Thy being near me is a bark coming
Towards the shore and bearing with me
The child[3] I lost out of thought
Before God was, ere being was becoming.
Thy being near me softens awhile
This rabe, this unrest. Go not, smile,
Play, barks on me or not
That little is errand…
Oh soft waves freshing my thoughts…
O breeze why my wills of woe.
14-8-1915.
[1] of /for\
[2] strange /dreamed\
[3] child /soul\
