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Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 4: Love Beatified.
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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 Beatified.

LOVE, slain by us and buried yesterday,
Rose up again, nor in his grave would stay.
On his earth-stainèd brow and sightless eyes
Still shone the splendours of our Paradise.
Hushed was each dissonance, every fault made clean,
And joys alone I saw, that might have been.
It never seemed our Love could shew so fair
As that dead Presence, shrined in glory there.
I would not have our Love to live again,
And blend each pleasure with his greater pain.—
Oh better far this blessèd death, and rest!
Dead Love I clasp, I cherish to my breast
And ever shall, for this I know is best!