Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 38: Coeur de Femme.

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

Coeur de Femme.

I CANNOT think that woman love as we

Love them, with soul and body, breath and blood,

And spent soul tortured in the strangling flood

Of passion’s tense oblivious agony;

I cannot think the kiss She gives to me

Thrills her white body as it pulses mine,

Or in Love’s chalice of ambrosial wine

She drowns all things which were or are to be.

We please them with our smile, for they are vain

And Love a flatterer is; they joy to fling

A rose-entwinèd leash about their slave;

Purple and gold they take, and winnowed grain

Of gems from Hesperus’ isle,—all men will bring;

But Love—lies bleeding by a woman’s grave!