The Lion and the Rose Read Online Free PDF

cherished, mortal heart,
    Hold your way deep as roots push rocks apart
    To bring the spurt of green up from the dark.
    Where music thundered let the mind be still,
    Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
    What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
    Here close to earth the deeper pulse is stirred,
    Here where no wings rush and no sudden bird,
    But only heart-beat upon beat is heard.
    Here let the fiery burden be all spilled,
    The passionate voice at last be calmed and stilled
    And the long yearning of the blood fulfilled.
    Now voyager, come home, come home to rest,
    Here on the long-lost country of earth’s breast
    Lay down the fiery vision and be blest, be blest.

MY SISTERS, O MY SISTERS
    I
    “Nous qui voulions poser, image ineffaceable
    Comme un delta divin notre main sur le sable”
    ANNA DE NOAILLES
    Dorothy Wordsworth, dying, did not want to read,
    “I am too busy with my own feelings,” she said.
    And all women who have wanted to break out
    Of the prison of consciousness to sing or shout
    Are strange monsters who renounce the treasure
    Of their silence for a curious devouring pleasure.
    Dickinson, Rossetti, Sappho—they all know it,
    Something is lost, strained, unforgiven in the poet.
    She abdicates from life or like George Sand
    Suffers from the mortality in an immortal hand,
    Loves too much, spends a whole life to discover
    She was born a good grandmother, not a good lover.
    Too powerful for men: Madame de Stael. Too sensitive:
    Madame de Sévigné, who burdened where she meant to give.
    Delicate as that burden was and so supremely lovely,
    It was too heavy for her daughter, much too heavy.
    Only when she built inward in a fearful isolation
    Did any one succeed or learn to fuse emotion
    With thought. Only when she renounced did Emily
    Begin in the fierce lonely light to learn to be.
    Only in the extremity of spirit and the flesh
    And in renouncing passion did Sappho come to bless.
    Only in the farewells or in old age does sanity
    Shine through the crimson stains of their mortality.
    And now we who are writing women and strange monsters
    Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,
    Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands
    More gently and more subtly on the burning sands.
    To be through what we make more simply human,
    To come to the deep place where poet becomes woman,
    Where nothing has to be renounced or given over
    In the pure light that shines out from the lover,
    In the warm light that brings forth fruit and flower
    And that great sanity, that sun, the feminine power.
    II
    Let us rejoice in
    The full curve of breast,
    The supple thigh
    And all riches in
    A woman’s keeping
    For man’s comfort and rest
    (Crimson and ivory)
    For children’s nourishment
    (Magic fruits and flowers).
    But when they are sleeping,
    The children, the men,
    Fed by these powers,
    We know what is meant
    By the wise serpent,
    By the gentle dove,
    And remember then
    How we wish to love.
    Let us rejoice now
    In these great powers
    Which are ours alone.
    And trust what we know:
    First the green hand
    That can open flowers
    In the deathly bone,
    And the magic breast
    That can feed the child,
    And is under a hand
    A rose of fire in snow
    So tender, so wild
    All fires come to rest,
    All lives can be blest—
    So sighs the gentle dove,
    Wily the serpent so,
    Matched in a woman’s love.
    III
    Eve and Mary the mother are our stem;
    All our centuries go back to them.
    And delicate the balance lies
    Between the passionate and wise:
    Of man’s rib, one, and cleaves to him;
    And one bears man and then frees him.
    This double river has created us,
    Always the re-discovered, always the cherished.
    (But many fail in this. Many have perished).
    Hell is the loss of balance when woman is destroyer.
    Each of us has been there.
    Each of us knows what the floods can do.
    How many women mother their husbands
    Out of all strength and secret Virtu ;
    How many women love an only son
    As a lover loves, binding the free hands.
    How