Title:  Emblems Of Love

Author:  Lascelles Abercrombie

Release Date:  March 26, 2005 [EBook #15472]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK emblems of love ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, S.R.  Ellison and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

EMBLEMS OF LOVE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

INTERLUDES AND POEMS

EMBLEMS OF LOVE

Designed in several discourses
by Lascelles Abercrombie

"Wonder it is to see in diverse mindes How diversly love doth his pageaunts play”

“Ego tamquam centrum, circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentiae partes"_

TO MY WIFE

TABLE

page hymn to love 3

Part I Discovery and prophecy
  prelude 7
  Vashti 16

Part II imperfection
  three girls in love: 
    Mary:  A legend of the ’45 77
    Jean 94
    Katrina 109

Part III virginity and perfection
  Judith 127
  the eternal wedding 188

Marriage song                   200
epilogue:  Dedication            209

EMBLEMS OF LOVE

HYMN TO LOVE

We are thine, O Love, being in thee and made of thee,
    As thou, Love, were the deep thought
And we the speech of the thought; yea, spoken are we,
          Thy fires of thought out-spoken: 

But burn’d not through us thy imagining
    Like fierce mood in a song caught,
We were as clamour’d words a fool may fling,
          Loose words, of meaning broken.

For what more like the brainless speech of a fool,—­
    The lives travelling dark fears,
And as a boy throws pebbles in a pool
          Thrown down abysmal places?

Hazardous are the stars, yet is our birth
    And our journeying time theirs;
As words of air, life makes of starry earth
          Sweet soul-delighted faces;

As voices are we in the worldly wind;
    The great wind of the world’s fate
Is turned, as air to a shapen sound, to mind
          And marvellous desires.