T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.
Bianca
By Arthur Symons (18651945)(Bianca, I. From London Nights, 1895) |
HER cheeks are hot, her cheeks are white; | |
The white girl hardly breathes to-night, | |
So faint the pulses come and go, | |
That waken to a smouldering glow | |
The morbid faintness of her white. | 5 |
What drowsing heats of sense, desire | |
Longing and languorous, the fire | |
Or what white ashes, subtly mesh | |
The fascinations of her flesh | |
Into a breathing web of fire? | 10 |
Only her eyes, only her mouth, | |
Live, in the agony of drouth, | |
Athirst for that which may not be: | |
The desert of virginity | |
Aches in the hotness of her mouth. | 15 |
I take her hands into my hands, | |
Silently, and she understands; | |
I set my lips upon her lips; | |
Shuddering to her finger-tips | |
She strains my hands within her hands. | 20 |
I set my lips on hers; they close | |
Into a false and phantom rose; | |
Upon her thirsting lips I rain | |
A flood of kisses, and in vain; | |
Her lips inexorably close. | 25 |
Through her closed lips that cling to mine, | |
Her hands that hold me and entwine, | |
Her body that abandoned lies, | |
Rigid with sterile ecstasies, | |
A shiver knits her flesh to mine. | 30 |
Life sucks into a mist remote | |
Her fainting lips, her throbbing throat; | |
Her lips that open to my lips, | |
And, hot against my finger-tips, | |
The pulses leaping in her throat. | 35 |