Page:Selected Poems (Huxley).djvu/30

 Of this close-pressing earth, Shines also on your face and brings All its dear beauty back to me In a new miracle of birth.

I see you asleep and unpassioned, White-faced in the dusk of your hair— Your beauty so fleetingly fashioned That it filled me once with despair To look on its exquisite transience And think that our love and thought and laughter Puff out with the death of our flickering sense, While we pass ever on and away Towards some blank hereafter.

But now I am happy, knowing That swift time is our friend, And that our love's passionate glowing, Though it turn ash in the end, Is a rose of fire that must blossom its way Through temporal stuff, nor else could be More than a nothing. Into day The boundless spaces of night contract And in your opening eyes I see Night born in day, in time eternity.