晚香玉变稠,空气:昏昏入睡了谎言on open'd calyx and slipt sheath thro' all the garden bosom-bound beneath dense night that hangs, her own perturbing moon: no star: and heaven and earth, seeking their boon, meet in this troubled blood whereunder seethe cravings of darkling bliss whose fumes enwreathe some rose of rare-reveal'd delight: oh, soon! ? Ay, surely near ? the hour consents to bless! ? and nearer yet, all ways of night converge in that delicious dark between her breasts whom night and bloom and wayward blood confess, where all the world's desire is wild to merge its multitude of single suffering nests. Cloth'd now with dark alone, O rose and balm, whence unto world-sear'd youth is healing boon, what lures the tense dark round thy pulsing calm? Or does that flood-tide of luxurious noon, richly distill'd for thy sweet nutriment, now traitor, hearken to some secret moon. Eve's wifely guise, her dower that Eden lent, now limbeck where the enamour'd alchemist invokes the rarer rose, phantom descent; thy dewy essence where the suns persist is alter'd by occult yet natural rite: among thy leaves it was the night we kiss'd. Rare ooze of odour drowns our faint delight, some spilth of love that languishes unshared, a rose that bleeds unseen, the heart of night; whose sweetness holds us, wondering, ensnared: for cunning she, the outcast, to entice to wake with her, remembering how she fared in times before our time, when Paradise shone once, the dew-gem in her heart, and base betrayal gave her to the malefice that all thro' time afflicts her lonely face, and all the mournful widowhood of night closed round her, and the wilderness of space: O bleeding rose, alone! O heart of night! This is of Lilith, by her Hebrew name Lady of Night: she, in the delicate frame that was of woman after, did unite herself with Adam in unblest delight; who, uncapacious of that dreadful love, begat on her not majesty, as Jove, but the worm-brood of terrors unconfest that chose henceforth, as their avoided nest, the mire-fed writhen thicket of the mind. She, monsterward from that embrace declined, could change her to Chimera and inspire doubt of his garden-state, exciting higher the arrowy impulse to dim descried o'erhuman bliss, as after, on the wide way of his travail, with enticing strain and hint of nameless things reveal'd, a bane haunted, the fabled siren, and was seen later as Lamia and Melusine, and whatsoe'er of serpent-wives is feign'd, or malice of the vampire-witch that drain'd fresh blood of fresh-born babes, a wicked blast: faces of fear, beheld along the past and in the folk's scant fireside lore misread, of her that is the august and only dread, close-dwelling, in the house of birth and death, and closer, in the secrets of our breath - or love occult, whose smile eludes our sight in her flung hair that is the starry night