Arthur Henry Adams: Verses about Woman

THE stone that all the sullen centuries,
With sluggish hands and massive fingers rude,
Against the sepulchre of womanhood
Had sternly held, she has thrust back with ease,
And stands, superbly arrogant, the keys
Of knowledge in her hand, won by a mood
Of daring, in her beauty flaunting nude,
Eager to drain life's wine unto the lees.
So she shall tempt and touch and try and taste,
And in the wrestle of the world shall lose
Her dimpled prettiness, her petals bruise;
But moulding ever to a truer type
She shall return to man, no more abased—
His counterpart, a woman, rounded, ripe.

YOU ask me why I love her;
Not a charm can you discover!
Would you see
The heart that a shut rose is,
And whose beauty ne'er uncloses
Save for me?
She is not rich or clever,
But her speeches thrill me ever,
And with bliss
My heart her whisper flutters,
Though the wisest word she utters
Is a kiss.
All evil things have shunned her,
And with a wide-eyed wonder
Is she tasked,
What lavish god has given
In her earth so much of heaven
All unasked?
She has no gifts or graces,
But the gladness in her face is
Sought of kings;
She cannot chant a measure,
But her heart with a grave pleasure
Ever sings.

Her gown is of the whitest
But the hem is soiled the slightest:
Little worth,
She has no wings to fly with,
And she prefers to hie with
Me on earth.
There is no hint of heaven
Or glimpse of deep thought even
In her eyes;
She is warm and she is human,
Just a weak and wilful woman—
Not too wise.
Her thousand beauties singing,
I have not said how clinging
Are her arms;
But, not loved and not the lover
Dare you ever hope discover
Half her charms?

AND so in the death-darkened chamber they met,
The woman that once he had loved and the one he loved yet—
The wife who had warped his desire and the woman he could not forget.
They stood by the bier where between them he slept,
And the love he had lost in his wife to her swimming eyes leapt;
But the woman his life had belonged to—his paramour—spoke not nor wept.
It was only a story of sated desire—
Of a love merely sensual burnt to an ash by its fire,
And a husband who turned to a more luscious love that was his for the hire.
All had sinned. For the husband had killed by his clutch,
Rough-handed, the fruit of a love that had dropped at his touch.
One woman's great sin was not loving, his wife's was in loving too much.

And so he had died; it was over at last;
And across him the two women looked at each other aghast—
Across his cold corse, and across the cold corse of the loathsome dead Past!
Then the smouldering love of the wife leapt to flame,
And she poured forth her kisses upon him, and called on his name.
But the other said “No, he is nothing to you; soul and body I claim!”
They looked at each other awhile. Said the wife wearily,
“He is mine; for I loved him, and ever shall love him; let be!”
But the other sneered, “No, he is mine, and mine only, because he loved me!”
Then the two laid their hands on the body between;
And fought for it, wife against paramour, fiercely, unseen—
For the body diseased and polluted, as ever his spirit had been.
And this is a question for answer in Hell:
To which of the two did his spirit belong, can you tell?
Think, was it the woman he loved, or the one who had loved him too well?

[ According to Maori mythology, the god Tiki created Man by taking a piece of clay and moistening it with his own blood. Woman was the offspring of a sunbeam and a sylvan echo .]
THUS God made Man to cope with destiny:
Taking the common clay, God moistened it
With His red blood; and so for ever lit
That sombre grossness with divinity.
So Man for ever finds him in the mesh
Of clogging earth; and though divine hopes thrill
And flush his leaping heart, it faints, for still
His dreams are pinioned in the gyves of flesh.
Yet ever God's blood in him courses free,
And, penetrated with eternal hope,
Up Evolution's long, uneven slope
Man lifts him from his sodden ancestry!
And though his eyes the far goal cannot see,
And half the terrors of the dark he knows,
Yet with an inward fire his courage glows;
He bears the torch of immortality.
But Woman from a memory had birth,
Into the forest's dignity of shade
A sudden sunbeam groped—a soft hand laid
In silent benediction on the earth.

Then filtered through the green a song forlorn
Of some forgotten bird. Lo! in a mist
Of love the sunbeam and the echo kissed,
And Woman—sunlit memory—was born.
So light and melody to her belong—
The sunlight in the dying echo blurred!
So Woman came—a vision and a word
From the unknown—a sunbeam and a song!
So ever through the forest of the years
Shall Man pursue and still pursue the gleam
That wavers and is gone; and through his dream
The fainting echo of a song he hears.
And when at last his weary feet are led
Into the sacred glade, and she stands there,
He takes her close—all song and sunlit hair:
The gleam has faded and the song has fled!
And though with blinded eyes he cannot see,
She haunts him like a word that he knows not—
That is not quite remembered, nor forgot—
Some thought that hovers near a memory.
As out from Heaven she leans, on earth there falls
The sunbeam of her hair, golden and fine;
And drops an echo of a voice divine—
A voice that ever vainly calls and calls!

And though she spill a splendour and a fire
Upon the dark, her glory is unknown;
Behind the screen of self she dwells alone
She cannot come as close as her desire.
So ever like a pale moon drowned in mist
Her face is vague—a barrier intervenes;
And ever from her loneliness she leans,
With waiting eyes, all-wistful to be kissed!