Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO THE EGYPTIAN LADY SENNUWY, by HELEN HOOVEN SANTMYER



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO THE EGYPTIAN LADY SENNUWY, by                    
First Line: With that same smile, scornful and sad and tender
Last Line: If beauty alwys is truth, after all.
Subject(s): Beauty; Egypt; Sennuwy, Princess (wife Of Hepzefa); Statues


With that same smile, scornful and sad and tender
You thought of love, one of those summer days
Gone in a night of many thousand years.
You sat in heavy-scented, golden splendor,
The courtly throng, the pomp and power and praise
Lost to unseeing eyes, unheeding ears.
. . . Only the artist caught your wandering gaze.

He did not understand the score and sadness
But carved your smile in this enduring guise,
A dwelling for your spirit in the tomb.
You knew that love is but a fleeting madness,
That each man lives alone, and lonely dies. . . .
You scorned yourself for quailing from your doom,
Yet thought of love, and met the sculptor's eyes.

And so you smiled, while dynasts came and went
And sand slipped through your crumbling broken wall,
While silence fell at last on echoing thunder
Of wars that power of ancient empires spent. . . .
Until at last, in this bright windy hall,
We pause, who know that love is brief, and wonder
If Beauty alwys is Truth, after all.





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