Poor helpless Shadow of Deceit,
The shadow of no magic flower,
I End you, Helen, in the Street
This unanointed sacred, hour:
Here where the dust of trodden feet
Desecrates the street.
This very hour that consecrates
All that the night could never keep
Menaces what our changeless Fates
Leave to us in our dreamless sleep:
Knave Menelaus desecrates
The folly of our Fates.
Only, before the night grows thin
About us in our city-street,
What is the sin that we must sin,
Helen, when dawn and darkness meet?
Fine webs of passion our souls spin
Out of their own deceit.
O lie with me on the naked grass
In uttermost abandonment,
Drink in the naked winds that pass,
Drink deep of the passion of their scent,
The scent of the Sea that sighs alas!
My Helen's scent!
You came to me from the seventh gate
Of that fire-doomed and deathless Troy,
O passion-pale and passionate,
O flesh most fair, mad to destroy
That flesh that you are mad to hate,
Mad to destroy.
Over bright Paris lies the dust,
And we are here and we must love
Until our Love transfigures Lust,
Then taste the poisoned scent thereof,
As on the gallows a man upthrust
Feeds on his lust.
