Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 7: Love’s Blindness.

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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 Blindness.

“O LOVE, my Love, thou canst not know how sweet,

How dear thou art!”—“Naught would I know, save this

That thou wilt ever yearn to share my kiss!

So being, I reck not whether years be fleet

Or endless!”—“But thou canst not see thy face

As others see thee! Thy deep eyes that greet

Their lucent-mirrored glimmerings, melt and meet

In glory there, to blind themselves a space!”

“Hush, O my heart! Thy vain hyperbole

Means naught; but take in both thy hands and turn

To thee this face of mine, and kiss my brow,

And after that mine eyes which cannot see

But only feel thy lips that thrill, and now

My mouth, and now—O God! thy kisses burn!”