Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 61: Dead Loves.

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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.

Dead Loves.

LONG summer nights with moon that yearneth down

On endless passion, through uncounted years,

On flames of love more hot than all those tears

Of ardent pain it worketh aye can drown;

Long summer nights in vast Assyria’s town,

At white-walled Athens, in imperial Rome,

Or midst dim Northern forests, by the foam

Of seas unsailed ere Arthur won renown.

Moonlight and leafshade—nights full sweet and long:

“O Love, my love, how white thy breast! Thy kiss

Upon my mouth, how mad!”—“And thou, how strong

Thine arms! I fear thy passion!”—“Tell me, must

Not Time and Death bow down to love like this?...”

Now, even their graves are crumbled into dust.