Ai, ai, poor mother, your birth-pangs were fruitless: I am wroth with these spirits.
|
O Sword, you are the younger brother, the latter-born,...
|
Her breasts under her gown are cold, for a flower has grown, murex-red on the red gown.
|
We are voyagers, discoverers of the not-known, the unrecorded; we have no map; possibly we will reach haven, heaven.
|
You prefer a woman under the earth, you heap roses above a grave;...
|
I will be free, no lover's kiss to bind me to earth, no bliss of love to counteract actual bliss.
|
That way of inspiration is always open,...
|
It was easy enough to bend them to my wish, it was easy enough to alter them with a touch.
|
I smiled, I waited, I was circumspect; O never, never, never write that I missed life or loving.
|
I was alone now my beautiful peace has gone; did I ask you here?
|
Gone the dear chatterer; Death succeeds Atimetus.
|
The race may or may not be to the swift, but tell me, is it likely that the fight will be entrusted to the dead?
|
No poetic phantasy but a biological reality,...
|
I'll stake all my soul on that beauty,...
|
How I envy you death; what could death bring,...
|
Let the palings of her bed Be quince and box-wood overlaid...
|
For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life.
|
Let him go forth radiant, let life rise in his young breast,...
|
My brain sang a rhythm I never dreamt to sing, "I will be gay and laugh and sing, he is going away."
|
Fall the deep curtains, delicate the weave, fair the thread.
|
Ardent yet chill and formal, how I ache to tempt a chisel as a sculptor.
|
Alas, day, you brought light, You trailed splendour...
|
Lais is now no lover of the glass, seeing no more the face as once it was, wishing to see that face and finding this.
|
She comes to meet death, To stain the altar of the goddess, To hold her girl-throat Toward the knife-thrust.
|
Honour came to me, though I sought it not;...
|
Each of us like you has died once, each of us like you stands apart, like you fit to be worshipped.
|
I knew the poor, I knew the hideous death they die,...
|
O heart, small urn of porphyry, agate or cornelian,...
|
It is not for me, the day, Nor this light of sun. Ah, mother, mother, The same terror is cast on us both.
|
The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle...
|