Page:Poems and ballads (IA poemsballads00swinrich).pdf/318

 With shaken rain or bitten through with drouth; When I, beholding ever how your mouth Waited for mine, the throat being fallen back, Saw crawl thereout a live thing flaked with black Specks of brute slime and leper-coloured scale, A devil's hide with foul flame-writhen grail Fashioned where hell's heat festers loathsomest; And that brief speech may ease me of the rest, Thus were you slain and eaten of the thing. My waked eyes felt the new day shuddering On their low lids, felt the whole east so beat, Pant with close pulse of such a plague-struck heat, As if the palpitating dawn drew breath For horror, breathing between life and death, Till the sun sprang blood-bright and violent." So finishing, her soft strength wholly spent, She gazed each way, lest some brute-hoovèd thing, The timeless travail of hell's childbearing, Should threat upon the sudden: whereat he, For relish of her tasted misery And tender little thornprick of her pain, Laughed with mere love. What lover among men But hath his sense fed sovereignly 'twixt whiles With tears and covered eyelids and sick smiles And soft disaster of a painèd face? What pain, established in so sweet a place, But the plucked leaf of it smells fragrantly? What colour burning man's wide-open eye