Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Philip Bourke Marston (1850–1887)

The First Kiss

SHE sat where he had left her all alone,

With head bent back, and eyes through love on flame,

And neck half flushed with most delicious shame,

With hair disordered, and with loosened zone;

She sat, and to herself made tender moan,

As yet again in thought her lover came,

And caught her by her hands and called her name,

And sealed her body as her soul his own.

The June moon-stricken twilight, warm, and fair,

Closed round her where she sat ’neath voiceless trees,

Full of the wonder of triumphant prayer,

And sense of unimagined ecstasies

Which must be hers, she knows, yet knows not why;

But feels thereof his kiss the prophecy.