MY LADY THE TYRANNESS.

Me since your fair ambition bows

Feodary to those gracious brows,

Is nothing mine will not confess

Your sovran sweet rapaciousness?

Though use to the white yoke inures,

Half-petulant is

Your loving rebel for somewhat his,

Not yours, my love, not yours!

Behold my skies, which make with me

One passionate tranquillity!

Wrap thyself in them as a robe,

She shares them not; their azures probe,

No countering wings thy flight endures.

Nay, they do stole

Me like an aura of her soul.

I yield them, love, for yours!

But mine these hills and fields, which put

Not on the sanctity of her foot.

Far off, my dear, far off the sweet

Grave pianissimo of your feet!

My earth, perchance, your sway abjures?—

Your absence broods

O'er all, a subtler presence. Woods,

Fields, hills, all yours, all yours!

Nay then, I said, I have my thought,

Which never woman's reaching raught;

Being strong beyond a woman's might,

And high beyond a woman's height,

Shaped to my shape in all contours.—

I looked, and knew

No thought but you were garden to.

All yours, my love, all yours!

Meseemeth still, I have my life;

All-clement Her its resolute strife

Evades; contained, relinquishing

Her mitigating eyes; a thing

Which the whole girth of God secures.

Ah, fool, pause! pause!

I had no life, until it was

All yours, my love, all yours!

Yet, stern possession! I have my death,

Sole yielding up of my sole breath;

Which all within myself I die,

All in myself must cry the cry

Which the deaf body's wall immures.—

Thought fashioneth

My death without her.— Ah, even death

All yours, my love, all yours!

Death, then, be hers. I have my heaven,

For which no arm of hers has striven;

Which solitary I must choose,

And solitary win or lose.—

Ah, but not heaven my own endures!

I must perforce

Taste you, my stream, in God your source,—

So steep my heaven in yours.

At last I said — I have my God,

Who doth desire me, though a clod,

And from His liberal Heaven shall He

Bar in mine arms His privacy.

Himself for mine Himself assures.—

None shall deny

God to be mine, but He and I

All yours, my love, all yours!

I have no fear at all lest I

Without her draw felicity.

God for His Heaven will not forego

Her whom I found such heaven below,

And she will train Him to her lures.

Nought, lady, I love

In you but more is loved above;

What made me, makes Him yours.

‘ I, thy sought own, am I forgot?’

Ha, thou?— thou liest, I seek thee not.

Why what, thou painted parrot, Fame,

What have I taught thee but her name?

Hear, thou slave Fame, while Time endures,

I give her thee;

Page her triumphal name!— Lady,

Take her, the thrall is yours.