Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn
Individual beauty
Thoughtful children, and the
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie
Her tolerant enchanted
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight
Among the glaciers and the
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.
Certainty,
On the stroke of midnight
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that
Softly round your dreaming
Such a day of welcome
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you
Watched by every human love.
January 1937
