WHAT thing shall be held up to woman's beauty? <br />Where are the bounds of it? Yea, what is all <br />The world, but an awning scaffolded amid <br />The waste perilous Eternity, to lodge <br />This Heaven-wander'd princess, woman's beauty? <br />The East and West kneel down to thee, the North <br />And South; and all for thee their shoulders bear <br />The load of fourfold space. As yellow morn <br />Runs on the slippery waves of the spread sea, <br />Thy feet are on the griefs and joys of men <br />That sheen to be thy causey. Out of tears <br />Indeed, and blitheness, murder and lust and love, <br />Whatever has been passionate in clay, <br />Thy flesh was tempered. Behold in thy body <br />The yearnings of all men measured and told, <br />Insatiate endless agonies of desire <br />Given thy flesh, the meaning of thy shape! <br />What beauty is there, but thou makest it? <br />How is earth good to look on, woods and fields, <br />The season's garden, and the courageous hills, <br />All this green raft of earth moored in the seas? <br />The manner of the sun to ride the air, <br />The stars God has imagined for the night? <br />What's this behind them, that we cannot near, <br />Secret still on the point of being blabbed, <br />The ghost in the world that flies from being named? <br />Where do they get their beauty from, all these? <br />They do but glaze a lantern lit for man, <br />And woman's beauty is the flame therein.<br /><br />Lascelles Abercrombie<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/from-vashti/
