I do not attach much importance to the publication or non publication of my poetry and never have done. Most of it (the published part) appeared five, ten, fifteen or even thirty or more years after they were written. The few recently published in magazines (not all of them new, e.g. the sonnets) owed their fate to Nolini's eagerness and not to my initiative. But the vast bulk of what I have written (long poems mostly) lies on shelf and in drawer, most of it for more than a decade, awaiting either dissolution or an interminable revision or total recasting which at the present rate may well retain them there a decade or two more. But that is my own idiosyncrasy—it cannot be a rule or example for others.
A flame-wind ran from the gold of the east, Leaped on my soul with the breath of a sevenfold noon. Wings of the angel, gallop of the beast! Mind and body on fire, but the heart in swoon.
O flame, thou bringest the strength of the noon, But where are the voices of morn and the stillness of eve? Where the pale-blue wine of the moon? Mind and life are in flower, but the heart must grieve.
Gold in the mind and the life-flame's red Make of the heavens a splendour, the earth a blaze, But the white and rose of the heart are dead. Flame-wind, pass! I will wait for Love in the silent ways.
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