Poem by Mathilde Blind

Beauty

Even as on some black background full of night
   And hollow storm in cloudy disarray,
   The forceful brush of some great master may
More brilliantly evoke a higher light;
So beautiful, so delicately white,
   So like a very metaphor of May,
   Your loveliness on my life's sombre grey
In its perfection stands out doubly bright.

And yet your beauty breeds a strange despair,
   And pang of yearning in the helpless heart;
To shield you from time's fraying wear and tear,
   That from yourself yourself would wrench apart,
How save you, fairest, but to set you where
   Mortality kills death in deathless art?

1. Love-Trilogy
2. Mourning Women
3. The Desert
4. Time's Shadow
5. Perfect Union

Elinor Wylie Beauty ("Say not of beauty she is good")

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