Ode on Beauty.

By Edward Shanks

Infinite peace is hanging in the air,

Infinite peace is resting on mine eyes,

That just an hour ago learnt how to bear

Seeing your body's flaming harmonies.

The grey clouds flecked with orange are and gold,

Birds unto rest are falling, falling, falling,

And all the earth goes slowly into night,

Steadily turning from the harshly bright

Sunset. And now the wind is growing cold

And in my heart a hidden voice is calling.

Say, is our sense of beauty mixed with earth

When lip on lip and breast on breast we cling,

When ecstasy brings short bright sobs to birth

And all our pulses, both our bodies sing?

When through the haze that gathers on my sight

I see your eyelids, know the eyes behind

See me and half not see me, when our blood

Goes roaring like a deep tremendous flood,

Calm and terrific in unhasty might,

Is then our inner sight sealed up and blind?

Or could it be that when our blood was colder

And side by side we sat with lips disparted

I saw the perfect line of your resting shoulder,

Your mouth, your peaceful throat with fuller-hearted,

More splendid joy? Ah poignant joys all these!

And rest can stab the heart as well as passion.

Yea, I have known sobs choke my heart to see

Your honey-coloured hair move languorously,

Ruffled, not by my hands, but by the breeze,

And I have prayed the rough air for compassion.

Yea, I have knelt to the unpiteous air

And knelt to gods I knew not, to remove

The viewless hands whose sight I could not bear

Out of the wind-blown head of her I love.

Ecstasy enters me and cannot speak,

Seizes my hands and smites my fainting eyes

And sends through all my veins a dim despair

Of never apprehending all so fair

And I have stood, unnerved and numb and weak,

Watching your breathing bosom fall and rise.

Ah no! This joy is empty, incomplete,

And sullied with a sense of too much longing,

Where thoughts and fancies, sweet and bitter-sweet,

And old regrets and new-born hopes come thronging.

Man can see beauty for a moment's space

And live, having seen her with an unfilmed eye,

If all his body and all his soul in one

Instant are tuned by passion to unison

And I can image in your kissing face

The eternal meaning of the earth and sky.