For so much loving I will give
So much in lips and eyes;

But love with bosom bared,
Sweet as a bird and wild,
That in her savage maidenhood
Cries for a little child.



VI


FOR THE BIRTHDAY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

(January 19, 1909)

Poet of doom, dementia, and death,
Of beauty singing in a charnel house,
Like the lost soul of a poor moon-mad maid,
With too much loving of some lord of hell;
Doomed and disastrous spirit, to what shore
Of what dark gulf infernal art thou strayed,
Or to what spectral star of topless heaven
Art lifted and enthroned?

The winter dark,
And the drear winter cold that welcomed thee
To a world all winter, gird with ice and storm
Thy January day--yea! the same world