Page:Poems and ballads (IA poemsballads00swinrich).pdf/116



you loved me ever so little, I could bear the bonds that gall, I could dream the bonds were brittle; You do not love me at all.

O beautiful lips, O bosom More white than the moon’s and warm, A sterile, a ruinous blossom Is blown your way in a storm.

As the lost white feverish limbs Of the Lesbian Sappho, adrift In foam where the sea-weed swims, Swam loose for the streams to lift,

My heart swims blind in a sea That stuns me; swims to and fro, And gathers to windward and lee Lamentation, and mourning, and woe.