Schwartz Wald <br /> <br /> <br />The heat of the mid-day has smitten the forest-land dumb ! <br />The mountains are closing their eyes in a languorous dream, <br />The boulders stand stark, where the torrents once hastened to come, <br />For Earth in her passion is wholly consuming their stream. <br /> <br />The ardour and terror of living is rife in the air, <br />The air that is breathless, and stranger to motion or sound, <br />A rapture so potent it seems near akin to despair <br />Is drawing the life-blood in mist, from the sunravished ground. <br /> <br />And out thro' this region grown tense with creation's desire, <br />Inconsequent, fragile as thistledown wafted by breeze, <br />Two butterflies flutter, like snow-flakes that fall upon fire, <br />Far into the flame-land, that stretches away from the trees. <br /> <br />White butterflies, innocent-looking and soft as a sigh, <br />In quest of what blossoms, what mystical pleasures, who knows? <br />Close one to the other they hover now low and now high, <br />Like thoughts that are breathed from the heart of an opening rose. <br /> <br />Vague spirits that drift o'er the infinite tide of the earth, <br />As jewels of foam, on the passion-torn breast of the sea, <br />They know not the hour of their ending, the cause of their birth, <br />A moment of time or a year, they rejoice but to be ! <br /> <br />Around them the problem of life, with its pain and its joy, <br />Impregnates the noon with a sense of some marvellous power, <br />Above them, grown potent with strength to create or destroy, <br />The shafts of the sun, that have smitten and withered the flower. <br /> <br />And still with frail bodies unmoved by the vastness of things <br />These fairy white butterflies flutter like spirits of light, <br />They pause for an instant, then spreading their tremulous wings, <br />Fly into the infinite, fading away from my sight.<br /><br />Radclyffe Hall<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/white-butterflies-4/
