SLEEPING
BEAUTY
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When
Beauty slept in the forest old
With gleaming breast and her hair of gold,
And the days went by with never a stir
That could reach her heart and waken her,
I was the Fortunate Prince who came
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5 |
To
touch her lips with the sacred flame,
And
kindle her pulse’s ebb and flow
With the warmth of life it used to know
Before
some evil enchantment stole
Like a blight of frost on her flowering soul.
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10 |
I was the envoy of Love’s desire
To quicken her life with holy fire.
Her
eyelids fluttered, her bosom heaved
Like virginal woods of spring new-leaved,
When
shimmering heats across them run
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15 |
At
the first warm touch of wakening sun.
She
opened her eyes, and over me
Flooded a glory of sunlit sea.
A
shudder of joy through her being ran
Like the stir of dawn when the first day began.
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‘The passion of earth so long unlearned
Through her slim white body swept and burned,
For
love in her was as if a star
Were lighted within a porcelain jar.
All
of love I had dreamed of old
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25 |
She
gave me again a hundredfold—
The
wine of ardor, the bread of truth,
And the golden robe of triumphant youth.
There
in the dusk of the haunted wood
Under the spell of life we stood,
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30 |
While the great moon, wondrous white and still,
The Lantern of Lovers, rose over the hill. |
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