6. Mummia

AS those of old drank mummia

To fire their limbs of lead,

Making dead kings from Africa

Stand pandar to their bed;

Drunk on the dead, and medicined

With spiced imperial dust,

In a short night they reeled to find

Ten centuries of lust.

So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,

Stuffed love’s infinity,

And sucked all lovers of all time

To rarify ecstasy.

Helen’s the hair shuts out from me

Verona’s livid skies;

Gypsy the lips I press; and see

Two Antonys in your eyes.

The unheard invisible lovely dead

Lie with us in this place,

And ghostly hands above my head

Close face to straining face;

Their blood is wine along our limbs;

Their whispering voices wreathe

Savage forgotten drowsy hymns

Under the names we breathe;

Woven from their tomb, and one with it,

The night wherein we press;

Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit

Your flaming nakedness.

For the uttermost years have cried and clung

To kiss your mouth to mine;

And hair long dust was caught, was flung,

Hand shaken to hand divine,

And Life has fired, and Death not shaded,

All Time’s uncounted bliss,

And the height o’ the world has flamed and faded,

Love, that our love be this!