Of all things tired thy lips look weariest,
Save the long smile that they are wearied of.
5 Ah sweet, albeit no love be sweet enough,
Choose of two loves and cleave unto the best;
Two loves at either blossom of thy breast
Strive until one be under and one above.
Their breath is fire upon the amorous air,
io Fire in thine eyes and where thy lips suspire:0 breathe out And whosoever hath seen thee, being so fair,
Two things turn all his life and blood to fire;
A strong desire begot on great despair,
A great despair cast out by strong desire.
2
is Where between sleep and life some brief space is,
With love like gold bound round about the head,
Sex to sweet sex with lips and limbs is wed,
Turning the fruitful feud of hers and his
To the waste wedlock of a sterile kiss;
20 Yet from them something like as fire is shed
That shall not be assuaged till death be dead,
Though neither life nor sleep can find out this.
Love made himself of flesh that perisheth
A pleasure-house for all the loves his kin;
25 But on the one side sat a man like death,
And on the other a woman sat like sin.
So with veiled eyes and sobs between his breath
Love turned himself and would not enter in.
3
Love, is it love or sleep or shadow or light
30 That lies between thine eyelids and thine eyes?
Like a flower laid upon a flower it lies,
Or like the night's dew laid upon the night.
Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right,
Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise
35 Shall make thee man and ease a woman's sighs,
Or make thee woman for a man's delight.
To what strange end hath some strange god made fair The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?
Hid love in all the folds of all thy hair,
40 Fed thee on summers, watered thee with showers,
I. Son of Hermes and Aphrodite. One day as he ing their bodies one. The statue in the Louvre that bathed in a spring, Salmacis, the nymph of the inspired this poem, a Roman copy of a Greek origspring, fell in love with him. When he rejected her, inal, shows the god lying on his side, with the she clung to him, praying that their bodies never breasts of a woman and the genitals of a man. be separated. The gods answered her prayer, mak
.
1 502 / ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Given all the gold that all the seasons wear
To thee that art a thing of barren hours?
4
Yea, love, I see; it is not love but fear.
Nay, sweet, it is not fear but love, I know;
45 Or wherefore should thy body's blossom blow
