Star In the West TNR.pdf - The Hermetic Library

These superb lines, like those of Swinburne, are in reality a series of brilliant
lyrical illustrations depicting the story in measures of divine song. More we
find in this same poem, and in others also; the following fine sonnet entitled
“The Summit of the Amorous Mountain,” is distinctly Swinburnian; I give it
in its entirety:
To love you, Love, is all my happiness;
To kill you with my kisses; to devour
Your whole ripe beauty in the perfect hour
That mingles us in one supreme caress;
To drink the purple of your thighs; to press
Your beating bosom like a living flower;
To die in your embraces, in the shower
That dews like death your swooning loveliness.
To know you love me; that your body leaps
With the quick passion of your soul; to know
Your fragrant kisses sting my spirit so;
To be one soul where Satan smiles and sleeps—
Ah! in the very triumph-hour of Hell
Satan himself remembers whence he fell!*
*The Temple of the Holy Ghost, vol. i, p. 181.
Again, such lines as these from the “Triumph of Man”:
And all the earth is blasted; the green sward
Burns where it touches, and the barren sod
Rejects the poison of the blood of God.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
To tread base thoughts as our high thoughts have trod,
Deep in the dust, the carrion that was God;*
*Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic, vol. i, pp. 106, 107.
remind us strongly of such pieces as “Before a Crucifix,” whilst others take
us into the mystic and simple land of Blake, such as the duet of Charicles
and Archais: