| And thus declared that Arab lady: |
| ‘Last night, where under the wild moon |
| On grassy mattress I had
laid me, |
| Within my arms great Solomon, |
| I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue |
| Not his, not mine.’ |
|
|
|
|
| Who understood |
| Whatever has been said, sighed, sung, |
| Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled,
cried, crowed, |
| Thereon replied: ‘A cockerel |
| Crew from a blossoming apple bough |
| Three hundred years
before the Fall, |
| And never crew again till now, |
| And would not now but that he thought, |
| Chance being at
one with Choice at last, |
| All that the brigand apple brought |
| And this foul world were dead at last. |
| He that
crowed out eternity |
| Thought to have crowed it in again. |
| For though love has a spider’s eye |
| To find out
some appropriate pain— |
| Aye, though all passion’s in the glance— |
| For every nerve, and tests a lover |
| With cruelties of Choice and Chance; |
| And when at last that murder’s over |
| Maybe the bride-bed brings
despair, |
| For each an imagined image brings |
| And finds a real image there; |
| Yet the world ends when
these two things, |
| Though several, are a single light, |
| When oil and wick are burned in one; |
| Therefore a
blessed moon last night |
| Gave Sheba to her Solomon.’ |
|
|
|
|
| ‘Yet the world stays.’ |
| ‘If that be so, |
| Your cockerel
found us in the wrong |
| Although he thought it worth a crow. |
| Maybe an image is too strong |
| Or maybe is
not strong enough.’ |
|
|
|
|
| ‘The night has fallen; not a sound |
| In the forbidden sacred grove |
| Unless a petal hit
the ground, |
| Nor any human sight within it |
| But the crushed grass where we have lain; |
| And the moon is
wilder every minute. |
| O! Solomon! let us try again.’ |
