Poem by Alan Seeger

The Bayadere

Flaked, drifting clouds hide not the full moon's rays
More than her beautiful bright limbs were hid
By the light veils they burned and blushed amid,
Skilled to provoke in soft, lascivious ways,
And there was invitation in her voice
And laughing lips and wonderful dark eyes,
As though above the gates of Paradise
Fair verses bade, Be welcome and rejoice!

O'er rugs where mottled blue and green and red
Blent in the patterns of the Orient loom,
Like a bright butterfly from bloom to bloom,
She floated with delicious arms outspread.
There was no pose she took, no move she made,
But all the feverous, love-envenomed flesh
Wrapped round as in the gladiator's mesh
And smote as with his triple-forked blade.

I thought that round her sinuous beauty curled
Fierce exhalations of hot human love, --
Around her beauty valuable above
The sunny outspread kingdoms of the world;
Flowing as ever like a dancing fire
Flowed her belled ankles and bejewelled wrists,
Around her beauty swept like sanguine mists
The nimbus of a thousand hearts' desire.

1. Thirty Sonnets. 5. Sonnet 5. A tide of beauty with returning May
2. Tithonus
3. Thirty Sonnets. 15. Sonnet 15. Above the ruin of God's holy place
4. Thirty Sonnets. 13. Sonnet 13. I fancied, while you stood conversing there
5. Thirty Sonnets. 30. At the Tomb of Napoleon before the Elections in America--November, 1912

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