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Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 24: Love’s Prayer.
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About This Book

A collection of verse that shifts between brisk depictions of modern life—motor races and city heat—and intimate lyrical sonnets exploring love, memory, and devotional longing. Classical and medieval references recur alongside pagan pastoral fantasies that imagine escape to woodland Hesperides, while formal experiments include songs, sonnets, ballades, rondeaux and a pantoum. A seasonal sequence maps moods across spring to winter, and a concluding suite treats mortality through elegy and dark humor. The poems balance energetic narrative scenes with reflective, sometimes elegiac meditations on desire, nature, and death.

Love’s Prayer.

WHEN thy ripe lips in kisses mould to meet
Mine eager mouth—when thy full pulsing throat
Throbs with thy quickening life-breath—when the float
And tangle of thine ungirt hair, oh Sweet,
Entwines us, breast to breast, the perfumed heat
Of each wild sigh fans all my face aflame,
And beat to beat our passionate hearts the same
Responses cry, as we Love’s creed repeat.
When in each other’s arms, love-wearied, we
Both nested safe in silken cushions warm
At Winter-evenfall entrancèd lie,
Kissing but closer as we list the storm,
Then pray we, midst our sweet antiphony
But this—that love like ours may never die!...