Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
VIII. Wedded LoveLord Walters Wife
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (18061861)“B
And her eyes were alive in their depth, as the kraken beneath the sea-blue.
And able to strangle my soul in a mesh of your gold-colored hair.”
And too much beauty, I reckon, is nothing but too much sun.”
I value your husband, Lord Walter, whose gallop rings still from the limes.”
If two should smell it, what matter? who grumbles, and where ’s the pretence?”
To love her alone, alone, who alone and afar loves me.”
Will you vow to be safe from the headache on Tuesday, and think it will hold?”
In your lap to be pure; so I leave you: the angels would make me afraid.”
And Dora, the child, observes nothing, although you should please me and stay.”
Why, now, you no longer are fatal, but ugly and hateful, I swear.”
Who are shocked if a color not virtuous is frankly put on by a vice.”
That we smell them! you think in our presence a thought ’t would defame us to hear!
To find me too fair as a woman? Why, sir, I am pure, and a wife.
I brushed you more close than the star does, when Walter had set me as high?
To uses unlawful and fatal. The praise!—shall I thank you for such?
You attain to it, straightway you call us no longer too fair, but too vile.
I must utter, though womanly custom would set it down better unsaid.
You kissed my fan when I dropped it. No matter! I ’ve broken the thing.
In the senses,—a vice, I have heard, which is common to beasts and some men.
And immortal as every great soul is that struggles, endures, and fulfils.
For the sake of … what was it? an eyebrow? or, less still, a mole on a cheek?
About crimes irresistible, virtues that swindle, betray, and supplant,
By illusion, you wanted precisely no more of me than you have now.
That the eyes of such women as I am are clean as the palm of a man.
You take us for harlots, I tell you, and not for the women we are.
I vowed that he should not be mulcted, by me, in the hand of a friend.
Come, Dora, my darling, my angel, and help me to ask him to dine.”