IF I had been a boy, I would have worshiped your grace, I would have flung my worship before your feet, I would have followed apart, glad, rent with an ecstasy to watch you turn your great head, set on the throat, thick, dark with its sinews, burned and wrought like the olive stalk, and the noble chin and the throat. I would have stood, and watched and watched and burned, and when in the night, from the many hosts, your slaves, and warriors and serving men you had turned to the purple couch and the flame of the woman, tall like cypress tree that flames sudden and swift and free as with crackle of golden resin and cones and the locks flung free like the cypress limbs, bound, caught and shaken and loosed, bound, caught and riven and bound and loosened again, as in rain of a kingly storm or wind full from a desert plain. So, when you had risen from all the lethargy of love and its heat, you would have summoned me, me alone, and found my hands, beyond all the hands in the world, cold, cold, cold, intolerably cold and sweet. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SCHOOLBOYS IN WINTER by JOHN CLARE THE FORERUNNERS by GEORGE HERBERT SONNET: 67 by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE PEARLS OF THE FAITH: 57. AL-HAMID by EDWIN ARNOLD TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE by PAKENHAM THOMAS BEATTY HOOKER'S ACROSS by GEORGE HENRY BOKER THE ACID TEST by BERTON BRALEY |