Likeness Of My Beloved-Poem
Oh! How could I get my Love’s likeness
Could anything like Him be conceived
Could He in cameras be received
Could Artist stand to take His picture?
Oh! How could I get my Love’s likeness
Could anything like Him be conceived
Could He in cameras be received
Could Artist stand to take His picture?
Loud outcries and wounds which once would hurt and smart,
Now sound so sweet like hymns of praise and
Music’s palmy art,
O thief, O slanderer, robber dear
I Look sharp, come, Welcome, quick, O don’t you fear.
Dear little Violet, with Thy dewy eye,
Look up and tell me truly,
When no one is nigh,
What Thou art!
The moon is up, they see the moon,
I drink Thine eyebrows light,
Pig shows they hold full crowded, soon,
I watch and watch Thee, source of sight
I Nay, call no surgeons, doctors none,
For me my pain is all delight.
My self, the self is all to me,
The body, whither it goes what care I,
If tossed here and there or left to die.
I am Freedom’s Self; let the body as salt-sea spray
Be dashed hither and thither or up and away
Come on, ye pleasures, come on, ye pains,
To me ye are equal/ the same, the same.
O my direct blood relations,
Beat in arteries and in veins.
Plants and air, light and water,
All other relations are but chains.
Bone of bone, my blood of blood
Are mountains, rivers, sun and rains.