Steeps down which she sped with leopardess
Limbs into miasmic deeps.
"Swim," she gasped behind--
Then like a she-wolf whined.

It almost seemed to me as deadening as the sluice of dreary Styx.
Fire and foulness mixed with leadening
Slush I drank; but swam the reddening
Stuff a league with weary licks.
Up a sulphurous bank
We climbed, and there I sank.

Again she laughed that laugh--a shrivelling, ghastly, gaunt, uncanny
spate.
Up I sprang and cursed my snivelling
Soul for weariness--for drivelling,
And for so forgetting Hate.
"You will find him there"
She pointed--thro her hair.

I write these words from Hell where bloodily locked with him in fight
I woke.
Where we fall down caverns ruddily
Spilt with glazing gore and muddily
Dashed with stagnant night and smoke.
Yet I do not care,
For he groans by me--there.

AT THE HELM

(_Nova Scotian_)

Fog, and a wind that blows the sea
Blindly into my eyes.
And I know not if my soul shall be
When the day dies.

But if it be not and I lose
All that men live to gain--
I who have little known but hues
Of wind and rain--

Still I shall envy no man's lot,
For I have held this great,
Never in whines to have forgot
That Fate is Fate.

DEAD LOVE

If this should never end--
This wandering in oblivious mood
Along a rutless road that leads
From wood to deeper wood--
This crunching with unheedful foot
Acorns, I think, and withered leaves ...
Perhaps a rotten root--

If this should never end--
This seeing with insentient eyes
Something that seems like earth, and, too,
Like overbending skies;
This feeling, well--that time is space,
Space, time; and each a pallid glass
In which Life sees her face--

If it should never end--
The road, the wandering and the feel
Of dead infinities that seem
O'er our dead sense to steal,
And like seas cease above--
Would it much matter, love?

MORTAL SIN

(_Song for a drama_)

Much the wind
Knows of my heart,
Though he whispers in my ear
That he has seen me burn and start
When I dream of your breast, my dear.

Much the wind
Knows of my soul!
For no soul has he to lose
On a mistress who can dole
Kisses that drug as poison-dews.

SEA-MAD

(_A Breton Maid_)

Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me