Beauty’s Metempsychosis
That beauty such as thine
Can die indeed,
Were ordinance too wantonly malign:
No wit may reconcile so cold a creed
With beauty such as thine.
From wave and star and flower
Some effluence rare
Was lent thee, a divine but transient dower:
Thou yield’st it back from eyes and lips and hair
To wave and star and flower.
Shouldst thou to-morrow die,
Thou still shalt be
Found in the rose and met in all the sky:
And from the ocean’s heart shalt sing to me,
Shouldst thou to-morrow die.