White culmination of the dreams of earth, Thy splendour beacons to a loftier goal, Where, slipping earthward from the great new birth, The shadowy senses leave the essential soul! Oh, naked loveliness, not yet revealed, A moment hence that falling robe will show No prophecy like this, this great new dawn, The bare bright breasts, each like a soft white shield, And the firm body like a slope of snow Out of the slipping dream-stuff half withdrawn.
From peaks that clove the heavens asunder The hunchback god with sooty claws Loomed o'er the night, a cloud of thunder, And hurled the net of mortal laws; It flew, and all the world grew dimmer; Its blackness blotted out the stars, Then fell across the rosy glimmer That told where Venus couched with Mars.
And, when the steeds that draw the morning Spurned from their Orient hooves the spray, All vainly soared the lavrock, warning Those tangled lovers of the day: Still with those twin white waves in blossom, Against the warrior's rock-broad breast, The netted light of the foam-born bosom Breathed like a sea at rest.
And light was all that followed after, Light the derision of the sky, Light the divine Olympian laughter Of kindlier gods in days gone by: Low to her lover whispered Venus, "The shameless net be praised for this-- When night herself no more could screen us It snared us one more hour of bliss."
How like the sky she bends above her child, One with the great horizon of her pain! No sob from our low seas where woe runs wild, No weeping cloud, no momentary rain, Can mar the heaven-high visage of her grief, That frozen anguish, proud, majestic, dumb. She stoops in pity above the labouring earth, Knowing how fond, how brief Is all its hope, past, present, and to come, She stoops in pity, and yearns to assuage its dearth.
Through that fair face the whole dark universe Speaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro' one white flower; And all those wrenched Promethean souls that curse The gods, but cannot die before their hour, Find utterance in her beauty. That fair head Bows over all earth's graves. It was her cry Men heard in Rama when the twisted ways With children's blood ran red! Her silence utters all the sea would sigh; And, in her face, the whole earth's anguish prays.