Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CALYPSO TO ULYSSES, by WILLIAM ALEXANDER PERCY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CALYPSO TO ULYSSES, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: If there were any room within my heart
Last Line: Than you an aging man's concupiscence.
Subject(s): Calypso (mythology); Mythology - Classical; Ulysses; Odysseus


If there were any room within my heart
For godly pride to linger, I should not kneel
And clasp your feet. But there's no tenant here
Save love, who makes me your idolater.

I am alone, beloved, but for you.
Cast out the sea-look from your eyes and look
On me, my utter self -- no luring left,
No unused wile to whet your appetite.

You know me all and all of me is yours.
I should have kept some harlot reticence.
To bait the surfeiting beast in you. Alas!
Shrink not. Men's modesty is but in speech.

These are still gray eyes and pomegranate lips
As once you called them, whispering through my hair,
In the dawn-stillness when the dawn-bird sang
And blissfully your drowsy kisses clung.

What is the loss that loses me your favor,
Your misty voice, your eyes spilled full of color,
Your hands whose very stillness in a curve
Betrayed their greediness to reach for mine?

Ah, do you dream, lover no longer young,
That those frail ecstasies can be lived over
If only on some new young breast you slumber
And fresher lips yearn to you in the dark?

There is no second spring: your first is past
And it was passed with me and you are mine!
Or can a woman never claim as hers
The heart of any man before it breaks?

O, is the love of man a sunset waning,
A music slipping by, a one day's flower,
Its very fleetingness the magic flaw
That lures the fixed idolatrous love of woman?

Say not it is the sea that summons you
Or such affairs as chafing heroes plan:
Hearted as that fierce pleading wanderer
That once was you, nothing could draw you from me.

Beloved, leave me not! There is such torrer
In the lonliness of souls thas once were large!
Though yours be never lonely, without you
Mine were a gray rock in a wintry sun.

No use, no use! The touch of you tells me that.
This body that I gave you when the gift
Was begged as sole alternative to death
Has served, and staled. . . The sea calls and you go.

Then go. . . No, I should hate a sea-cold kiss:
Remembered ones will do. . . And I'll endure
Lonliness with more profit and more pride
Than you an aging man's concupiscence.





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