Page:The Happy Marriage and Other Poems.pdf/39

 Blind, blind your brow And your too candid eyes: You cannot love me now, You cannot love what even love denies.

This was not love but love's true negative That spends itself in passion to be spent, And lives no longer than the wish may live To waste itself and then is impotent. And fails not only but confounds in fault What love most lives upon, the very need, The lack, the famine, the too thirsty salt, Till wanting want love has no will to feed.

Yet, in the glut and surfeit of desire Desire itself was perfected and found, And fever burned by its consuming fire Was bare as martyrs' bones beneath the ground.