Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/162

 But round their beauty on azure evenings

Only the oreads go on gauzy wings,

Only the oreads troop with dance and song

And airy beings in rainbow mists who throng

Out of those wonderful worlds that lie afar

Betwixt the outmost cloud and the nearest star.

Like the moon, sanguine in the orient night

Shines the red flower in her beautiful hair.

Her breasts are distant islands of delight

Upon a sea where all is soft and fair.

Those robes that make a silken sheath

For each lithe attitude that flows beneath,

Shrouding in scented folds sweet warmths and tumid flowers,

Call them far clouds that half emerge

Beyond a sunset ocean's utmost verge,

Hiding in purple shade and downpour of soft showers

Enchanted isles by mortal foot untrod,

And there in humid dells resplendent orchids nod;

There always from serene horizons blow

Soul-easing gales and there all spice-trees grow

That Phœnix robbed to line his fragrant nest

Each hundred years in Araby the Blest.

Star of the South that now through orient mist

At nightfall off Tampico or Belize

Greetest the sailor rising from those seas

Where first in me, a fond romanticist, 112