T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.
Love Triumphant
By George Sylvester Viereck (18841962)(From Nineveh and Other Poems, 1907) YOUR body’s treasures are mine to-day, | |
Though bitter as gall be their savour still; | |
From head to foot shall my kisses play, | |
Till naught is kept from their sovereign will! | |
The voice of my need supreme must guide | 5 |
My passionate love to its destined goal; | |
My feverish fingers shall seek and glide | |
Until at the last I hold the soul. | |
My hot strong hands will no veil endure | |
That shadows your radiant nakedness; | 10 |
Lay bare each beauty, conceal no lure, | |
Leave naught to hinder my fond caress! | |
Young blood beats onward, unchecked by shame, | |
When passion’s harvest is ripe to reap; | |
For who shall speak with the raging flame, | 15 |
Or stay the cataract in its leap? | |
My armies have stormed at your city’s gate— | |
I have conquered you, hold you. Might is right | |
With the beasts of the wild that celebrate | |
In the jungle their primal marriage night. | 20 |
You too are moved by the selfsame power, | |
Your quick breath tells in its shuddering fall: | |
There is naught so strong as love this hour— | |
Call it god or beast, it is lord of all! | |
The god in me and the beast in me | 25 |
And all deep things come up to light; | |
And I would barter my soul to be | |
The prize of love for a single night. | |
One long, long night of supreme desire, | |
One long, long night of riot and rage; | 30 |
For you are the sea and I the fire, | |
And old as the world is the war we wage. | |
The old, old strife of woman and man | |
That ever has been, and still shall be | |
Until the day when the vaulted span | 35 |
Shall sink a wreck in the whelming sea. | |
Once fed, no longer the wolf-pack raves: | |
But love can never of madness tire, | |
And I must drown in your passion’s waves, | |
And you consume in my hot desire. | 40 |
This the law of the flowering south, | |
Of the snow-clad north where the world is white … | |
You shall faint and fall as I crush your mouth | |
Beneath a conqueror’s ruthless might! | |
My life is poured in the stream of yours, | 45 |
But fire and flood were not meant to mate: | |
We shall never be one while the world endures— | |
And the meaning of love at the last is hate! | |
My soul is drunk with your maddening charms; | |
You have taken all—I have naught to lose. | 50 |
About me tighten your slender arms | |
With the very grip of the hangman’s noose. | |
So let us struggle, both flame and flood, | |
Let love and hate and sense have play | |
Till the slow dawn rises bathed in blood, | 55 |
And you and I are dead ere day! | |