Poems (Stuart)/Leda
LEDA.
Do you remember, Leda?
There are those who love, to whom Love bringsGreat gladness: such thing have not I.Love looks and has no mercy, bringsLong doom to others. Such was I.Heart breaking hand upon the lute,Touching one note only . . . such were you.Who shall play now upon that luteLong last made musical by you?Sharp bird-beak in the swelling fruit,Blind frost upon the eyes of flowers.Who shall now praise the shrivelled fruit,Or raise the eyelids of those flowers?
I dare not watch that hidden pool,Nor see the wild bird's sudden wingLifting the wide, brown, shaken pool,But round me falls that secret wing,And in that sharp, perverse, sweet painThat is half-terror and half-bliss My withered hands are curled on painThat were so wide once after bliss.And gold is springing in my hairAs my thoughts spring and flower with it,Though I sit hid in my grey hair,Without love or the pain of it.
Yet, oh my Swan, if love have wings,As the gods tell us, you were loveWho took and broke me with those wings.I, weak, and being far gone in loveLet blushless things be breathed and done—Things flowered out now in bitter fruitThat once done are no more undoneThan last year's frost and last year's fruit.
For what has come of love and meWho knew the first joy that loving is?Where has love led and beckoned meBut to the end where nothing is?I have seen my blood beat out againRed in the hands of all my line,My sin has swelled and flowered againCorrupt and fierce through Sparta's line.Bred through me—bred through delicate handsAnd wandering eyes and wanton lips,Sighing after strange flesh as sighed these lips, Straying after mew sin as strayed these hands.Mother of Helen! She whose breastsTo new desires unshaped the world;Above Troy's summit towered these breasts,Helen who wantoned with the world!Helen is dead (she had love enoughTo laugh at doom and mock at shrine)And Clytemnestra, quiet enoughTo-night beneath Apollo's shrine.And I am left, the source, the springOf all their madness. They are dead'While I still sit here, the old springThat fouled them flows above the dead.
But I have paid. I have borne enough.I am very old in love and woe.For all souls these things are enough—Who have known love are the friends of woe.There those who love, and who escape,There are those who love and do not die.I loved, and there was no escape,Long since I died and daily die.And death alone makes hate and loveFriends with each other and with sleep . . .All's quiet here that once was love,This that is left belongs to sleep.