Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BLUE STAR, by GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BLUE STAR, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: What I remember of the soul
Last Line: The blue star see.
Subject(s): Girls; Imagination; Memory; Fancy


WHAT I remember of the soul
That out of darkness on me stole,
Is just a blue star, like a mole,
Upon her brow, --
And then, her arms and ankle-rings;
A nameless mystery of things
Inscrutable about her clings,
And charms me now.

A mountain woman, Djelfa's child,
Whose foot had never left the wild,
She draws from nature undefiled
Her swaying grace;
Her body sparkles like a gem
Beneath the gold coins' clinking hem, --
Her throat an oleander stem,
A flower her face.

Out of the solitude she came
Into the waste without a name;
Dancing, she seems the wind-blown flame
Of desert fires;
Her beauty burns beneath the stars,
Her journeys no horizon bars,
In lands where nought the freedom mars
Of man's desires.

With lids that doze in panther sleep
Bedouins upon her motions keep
Their couchant eyes whose forward leap
She holds at gaze;
Of love that dwells beneath the tent
She makes her body eloquent;
At every step a veil is rent, --
The passions blaze.

I hear the tinkle of her feet
In world-wide rhythms darkly sweet,
That, drop by drop, my veins repeat,
Like violin-strings;
To the mute cadence of her hips
A growth of ages from me slips, --
In morning worlds my body dips
Primeval springs.

It seems a life before the Flood
Is hers, -- and hers the brotherhood
Of all that swam or flew or stood
In old marsh-lands;
A hundred centuries have rolled
To her the desert's tribute gold;
Dancing, she saw the world grow old
In buried sands.

And then, -- how strange my fancies are! --
I saw the dance, retreating far,
Diminish into that blue star,
Just like a mole;
It came upon me in the gloom
And grave dusk of the sombre room,
Soft as a disk of moth-wing bloom, --
The moth, her soul.

The dance was done. In gentle mood
A slender girl before me stood,
The slip of desert womanhood
My memory keeps;
But most the vision to me brings
The mystery of human things, --
How spirit unto spirit springs
Across what deeps.

Ah, had we power to enter in
To Nature's innocence of sin,
What revelations might begin
For you and me!
Oft through the wide world as I go,
I mind me where the date-palms grow,
And on a brow, serene and low,
The blue star see.





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