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THE DANCER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Was it your body lifted up
Last Line: With wild love in your eyes.
Subject(s): Dancing & Dancers; Love


WAS it your body lifted up
For Love to pour his rains into—
Your body bent, a rosied cup,
As rain fell from Love's cloud on you?
So Love sank all your body through
And left you bowed
Beneath that slow-winged cloud.

Or your mind was it, that but leaves
The body swaying in the wind?
With a mere thought the body heaves,
Or any memory unkind.
It is the mind, the dreaming mind
That bends you low
When cloud-shades sway and flow.

And breast and thigh and strained arms shake
Desiring each their fellow thought,
With sadness in your eyes awake:
O, wasting senses touched and wrought
To the mind's purposes, and caught
In the intense
Wind that humbles sense—

That humbles sense, as grasses blown
One way and sighing in the wind.
O Beauty, on Time's dungheap thrown
Forgotten, till a thought unkind
Creep burning through the new-waked mind,
And you arise
With wild love in your eyes.





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