Lesbia Harford: Verses about Love

Once I thought my love was worth the name
If tears came.
When the wound is mortal, now I know,
Few tears flow.

I'd love to have you on a rainy day
Tucked in a chair, my head against your knee
To sit and dream with. Sometime you must be
My home-sharer whom rain can't keep away.

I love to see
Her looking up at me,
Stretched on a bed
In her pink dressing gown,
Her arms above her head,
Her hair all down.
I love to see
Her smiling up at me.

Though I had lost my love,
The hills could calm me.
Deep in a woodland grove
No loss could harm me.
But when I came to town,
And saw around me
Lovers pass up and down —
Then sorrow crowned me.

I lie in the dark
Grass beneath and you above me,
Curved like the sky,
Insistent that you love me.
But the high stars
Admonish to refuse you
And I'm for the stars
Though in the stars I lose you.

If you have loved a brave story
Tell it but rarely;
And, with due faith in its glory,
Render it barely.
Then must the listener, hearing
Your tale of wonder,
Let his own hoping and fearing
Tear him asunder.

I had a lover who betrayed me.
First he implored and then gainsaid me.
Hopeless I dared no more importune.
I found new friends, a kinder fortune.
Silence, indifference did greet me.
Twice in long years he's chanced to meet me.
Yet when I see him I discover
I was inconstant, he the lover.

I do hate the folk I love-
They hurt so.
Their least word and act may be
Source of woe.
'Won't you come to tea with me?'
'Not today'
I'm so tired, I've been to church
Such folk say.

All the dreary afternoon
I must clutch
At the strength to love like them
Not too much

I dreamt last night of happy home-comings.
Friends I had loved and had believed were dead
Came happily to visit me and said
I was a part of their fair home-coming
It's strange that I should dream of welcomings
And happy meetings when my love, last week
Returned from exile, did not even speak
Or write to me or need my welcoming.

They say — priests say —
That God loves the world.
Maybe he does,
When the dew is pearl'd
On the emerald grass,
Or the young dawns shine
Would you be satisfied,
Proteus mine,
Just to be loved
When your hair was curled,
As Earth is beloved
When earth is fine?
I love you more
Than God loves the world.

When I was still a child
I thought my love would be
Noble, truthful, brave,
And very kind to me.
Then all the novels said
That if my lover prove
No such man as this
He had to forfeit love.
Now I know life holds
Harder tasks in store.
If my lover fail
I must love him more.
Should he prove unkind,
What am I, that he
Squander soul and strength
Smoothing life for me?
Weak or false or cruel
Love must still be strong.
All my life I'll learn
How to love as long.

The love I look for
Could not come from you.
My mind is set to fall
At Peterloo.
But you'ld protect me,
I'd be safe with you.
You could but love me
In the olden way,
With gifts of jewels, children,
Time to play,
Be man to woman
In the olden way.
The love that's love has
Other gifts to bring,
A share in weakness, dreams,
And suffering.
These are the only
Gifts I'd have to bring.
The love I look for
Does not come from you.
I see it dawning in
Deep eyes of blue.
I dare to hope for
Love, but not from you.

I sit at my machine,
Hour long beside me Vera aged nineteen,
Babbles her sweet and innocent tale of sex.

Her boy, she hopes, will prove
Unlike his father in the act of love,
Twelve children are too many for her taste.

She looks sidelong, blue-eyed
And tells a girlish story of a bride
With the sweet licence of Arabian queens.

Her child, she says, saw light
Minute for minute, nine months from the night
The mother first lay in her lover’s arms.

She says a friend of hers
Is a man’s mistress who gives jewels and furs
But will not have her soft limbs cased in stays.

And is love very strong where honour rules?
Would the world ever speak of Lancelot's love
Or Tristram's love had they put honour first?
What would you think if Guinevere had knelt
And begged for kisses and had begged in vain?
Should she be constant had she been refused
Or would she laugh and turn to love elsewhere?
But Joseph is a hero nowadays
And young Paolo, the Italian blood,
Rather too rash and uncontrollable.
Lovers who are not free should sigh and part—
Lovers, you call them—and not free to love:
They may be wives or husbands, businessmen,
Saints even: they're not lovers. After all
I'd rather be a lover than a saint.

When my lover put the sea between us
And went wandering in Italy
My poor silly heart miscalled his journey—
'Leaving me'.
Towns of Spain and Italy he stayed in,
Each and all of them to me unknown;
How could he find pleasure being a lover,
Being alone!
Truly I was not as fair as Venice,
Noble as Siena, strange as Rome.
Certainly he loved Milan and Florence
More than home.
I believed his absence had estranged us
And across the heart-dividing sea
Sent him word that I no longer loved him.
Foolish me!
Came his answer after months of waiting
Echoing my letter, lie for lie.
Truth or lies I know not. Which unfaithful,
He or I.

I'm like all lovers, wanting love to be
A very mighty thing for you and me.
In certain moods your love should be a fire
That burnt your very life up in desire.
The only kind of love then to my mind
Would make you kiss my shadow on the blind
And walk seven miles each night to see it there,
Myself within, serene and unaware.
But you're as bad. You'd have me watch the clock
And count your coming while I mend your sock.
You'd have my mind devoted day and night
To you and care for you and your delight.
Poor fools, who each would have the other give
What spirit must withhold if it would live.
You're not my slave, I wish you not to be.
I love yourself and not your love for me,
The self that goes ten thousand miles away
And loses thought of me for many a day.
And you loved me for loving much beside
But now you want a woman for your bride.
Oh, make no woman of me, you who can,
Or I will make a husband of a man.
By my unwomanly love that sets you free
Love all myself, but least the woman in me.

One summer day, along the street,
Men pruned the gums
To make them neat.
The tender branches, white with flowers,
Lay in the sun
For hours and hours,
And every hour they grew more sweet,
More honey-like
Until the street
Smelt like a hive, withouten bees.
But still the gardeners
Lopped the trees.
Then came the children out of school,
Noisy and separate
As their rule Of being is. The spangled trees
Gave them one heart:
Such power to please
Had all the flowering branches strown
Around for them
To make their own.
Then such a murmuring arose
As made the ears
Confirm the nose
And give the lie to eyes. For hours
Child bees hummed
In the honey flowers.
They gathered sprigs and armfuls. Some
Ran with their fragrant
Burdens home,
And still returned; and after them
Would drag great boughs.
Some stripped a stem
Of rosy flowers and played with these.
Never such love
Had earthly trees
As these young creatures gave. By night,
The treasured sprays
Of their delight
Were garnered every one. The street
Looked, as the council liked it, neat.

Standing on tiptoe, head back, eyes and arm
Upraised, Kate groped to reach the higher shelf.
Her sleeve slid up like darkness in alarm
At gleam of dawn. Impatient with herself
For lack of inches, careless of her charm,
She strained to grasp a volume; then she turned
Back to her chair, an unforgetful Eve
Still snatching at the fruit for which she yearned
In Eden. She read idly to relieve
The forehead where her daylong studies burned,
Tales of an uncrowned queen who fed her child
On poisons, till death lurked, in act to spring,
Between the girl's breasts; who with soft mouth smiled
With soft eyes tempted the usurping King
Then dealt him death in kisses. Kate had piled
Her books three deep before her and across
This barricade she watched an old man nod
Over a dirty paper, until loss
Of life seemed better than possession. Shod
With kisses death might skid like thistle floss
Down windy slides, might prove at heart as gay
As Cinderella in glass slippers.
Life goes awkwardly so sandalled. Had decay
Been the girl's gift in that Miltonic strife
She would have rivalled God, Kate thought. A ray
Of sunshine carrying gilded flecks of dust
And minutes bright with fancies, touched her hair
To powder it with gold and silver, just
As if being now admitted she should wear
The scholar's wig, colleague of those whose lust
For beauty hidden in an outworn tongue
Had made it possible for her to read
Tales that were fathered in Arabia, sung
By trouvères and forgotten with their creed
Of love and magic. Beams that strayed among
Kate's fingers lit a rosy lantern there
To glow in twilight. Suddenly afraid
She seemed to see her beauty in a flare
Of light from hell. A throng of devils swayed
Before her, devils that had learned to wear
The shape of scholar, poet, libertine.
They smiled, frowned, beckoned, swearing to estrange
Kate from reflection that her soul had been
Slain by her woman's body or would change
From contact with it to a thing unclean.
Woman was made to worship man, they preached,
Not God, to serve earth's purpose, not to roam
The heavens of thought . . . A factory whistle screeched,
Someone turned up the lights. On her way home
Kate wondered in what mode were angels breeched.