And while commanding blissful sight believe
It holds her as a body strained to breast,
Down on the underworld’s perpetual eve
She plunges the possessor dispossessed;
And bids believe that image, heaving warm,
Is lost to float like torch-smoke after flame;
The phantom any breeze blows out of form;
A thirst’s delusion, a defeated aim.

The rapture shed the torture weaves;
The direst blow on human heart she deals: 
The pain to know the seen deceives;
Nought true but what insufferably feels. 
And stabs of her delicious note,
That is as heavenly light to hearing, heard
Through shelter leaves, the laughter from her throat,
We answer as the midnight’s morning’s bird.

She laughs, she wakens gleeful cries;
In her delicious laughter part revealed;
Yet mother is she more of moans and sighs,
For longings unappeased and wounds unhealed. 
Yet would she bless, it is her task to bless: 
Yon folded couples, passing under shade,
Are her rich harvest; bidden caress, caress,
Consume the fruit in bloom; not disobeyed. 
We dolorous complainers had a dream,
Wrought on the vacant air from inner fire,
We saw stand bare of her celestial beam
The glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.

Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lips
Of upward curl to meanings half obscure;
And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skips
She nods:  at once that creature wears her lure. 
Blush of our being between birth and death: 
Sob of our ripened blood for its next breath: 
Her wily semblance nought of her denies;
Seems it the Goddess runs, the Goddess hies,
The generous Goddess yields.  And she can arm
Her dwarfed and twisted with her secret charm;
Benevolent as Earth to feed her own. 
Fully shall they be fed, if they beseech. 
But scorn she has for them that walk alone;
Blanched men, starved women, whom no arts can pleach. 
The men as chief of criminals she disdains,
And holds the reason in perceptive thought. 
More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains,
Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought. 
Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed,
Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed,
In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths: 
Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes
For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew. 
Comes there a tremor of night’s forest horn
Across her garden from the insaner crew,
She darkens to malignity of scorn. 
A shiver courses through her garden-grounds: 
Grunt of the tusky boar, the baying hounds,
The hunter’s shouts, are heard afar, and bring
Dead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring. 
These, the irreverent of Life’s design,
Division between natural and divine
Would cast; these vaunting barrenness for best,
In veins of gathered strength Life’s tide arrest;
And these because the roses flood their cheeks,