l.... Then it is lost and soundless.
Arnold stands under the sheer portal.

He goes searching the cells for Adalaisa
and sees her sleeping, beautiful, prone
at the feet of the naked Christ, without veil
without kerchief, without cloak, gestureless,
without any defense, there, sleeping....

She had a great head of turbulent hair.

"How like fine silk your hair, Adalaisa,"
thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.
She sleeps, she sleeps and little by little
a flush spreads over all her face
as if a dream had crept through her gently
until she laughs aloud very softly
with a tremulous flutter of the lips.

"What amorous lips, Adalaisa,"
thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.

A great sigh swells through her, sleeping,
like a seawave, and fades to stillness.

"What sighs swell in your breast, Adalaisa,"
thinks Arnold. But he stares at her silently.

But when she opens her eyes he, awake,
tingling, carries her off in his arms.

When they burst out into the open fields
it is day.

But the fear of life gushes suddenly to muddy the dear wellspring of
sensation, and the poet, beaten to his knees, writes:

And when the terror-haunted moment comes
to close these earthly eyes of mine,
open for me, Lord, other greater eyes
to look upon the immensity of your face.

But before that moment comes, through the medium of an extraordinarily
terse and unspoiled language, a language that has not lost its earthy
freshness by mauling and softening at the hands of literary
generations, what a lilting crystal-bright vision of things. It is as
if the air of the Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had been
hammered into cadences. The verse is leaping and free, full of echoes
and refrains. The images are sudden and unlabored like the images in
the Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebuchadnezzar's spell gets
to his feet "like a bear standing upright"; fishing boats being shoved
off the beach slide into the sea one by one "like village girls joining
a dance"; on a rough day the smacks with reefed sails "skip like goats
at the harbor entrance." There are phrases like "the great asleepness
of the mountains"; "a long sigh like a seawave through her sleep"; "my
speech of her is like a flight of birds that lead your glance into
intense blue sky"; "the disquieting unquiet sea." Perhaps it is that
the eyes ar