Lullaby

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