Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TWO WOMEN: AT BETROTHAL, by E. DORSET


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TWO WOMEN: AT BETROTHAL, by                    
First Line: We had found ease for all our souls' alarms
Last Line: For all her twenty years.
Subject(s): Courtship


We had found ease for all our souls' alarms,
And bade our hope combine;
And as I stood there, still as at some shrine,
She softly came into my waiting arms
In token she was mine.

I kissed, in silence, lip and cheek, closed eyes,
The fragrant forehead rare;
Then, softlier still, she drooped the young head there
And drew my face, ere I could find surprise,
Against her coiled-up hair.

I long had worshipped this, how unconfessed,
Thinking in each day-dream,
How its dark waves might, sometime loosened, stream
Beneath my soothing stroke, once full-possessed;
And passing what could seem,

For one mazed moment I had well forgot,
As into my close fold
She had surrendered; then I felt the cold
And silken helix of its towering knot,
Brushed bright and firmly rolled;

A giant cable, thicker than the wrist
That bade it not to fall,
Wound round and round until it covered all
The sweet head's crown with each bewildering twist
That made delight its thrall.

Through it I breathed, all seasoned scents and clear,
Long drafts of blent perfume
That I had sensed but vaguely in the room
When first I entered there and I drew near
Within the late day's gloom:

The cool northeastern mist, the August shower,
The smell of wheat when forth the clean scythe goes,
The fallen leaves in the wood, the summer's rose,
The delicate and pale arbutus-flower
Within the springtime snows.

Being by nature more than taciturn,
I did not speak of it,
Thrilled by the sense of strange and exquisite
Meanings I might not yet in full discern;
But she articulate,

Her own shy silence broken, told me how
Her mother, dead, through long yet prideful fears,
Had kept it well; it had not known the shears,
Coming untouched, unsullied with her now
For all her twenty years.





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