THE VENUS OF MILO

Backward she leans, as when the rose unblown

Slides white from its warm sheath some morn in May!

Under the sloping waist, aslant, her zone

Clings as it slips in tender disarray;

One knee, out-thrust a little, keeps it so

Lingering ere it fall; her lovely face

Gazes as o'er her own Eternity!

Those armless radiant shoulders, long ago

Perchance held arms out wide with yearning grace

For Adon by the blue Sicilian sea.

No; thou eternal fount of these poor gleams,

Bright axle-star of the wheeling temporal skies,

Daughter of blood and foam and deathless dreams,

Mother of flying Love that never dies,

To thee, the topmost and consummate flower,

The last harmonic height, our dull desires

And our tired souls in dreary discord climb;

The flesh forgets its pale and wandering fires;

We gaze through heaven as from an ivory tower

Shining upon the last dark shores of Time.

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Out of the slipping dream-stuff half withdrawn.