Strophe

Strophe

…I love you would have no application for the moment. I love you waits with cold wings furled, stands a cold angel shut up like Cherry-buds; cherry-buds not yet half in blossom. The cold rain and the mist and the scent of wet grass is in the unpronounceable words, I love you.
…I love you would have no possible application. It would tear down the walls of the city and abstract right and grace from the frozen image that might have right and grace painted upon its collar bones. The image has no right decoration for the moment, is swathed in foreign and barbaric garments, is smothered out in the odd garments of its strange and outlandish disproportion.
…the Nordic image that stands and is cold and has that high mark of queen-grace upon its Nordic forehead is dying…is dying…it is dying, its buds are infolded. If once the light of the sheer beauty of the Initiate could strike its features, it would glow like rare Syrian gold; the workmanship of the East would have to be astonishingly summoned to invent new pattern of palm branch, new decoration of pine-bud and the cone of the Nordic pine that the Eastern workman would so appropriately display twined with the Idaian myrtle. The Idaian myrtle would be shot with the enamel of the myrtle-blue that alone among workmen, the Idaian workmen fashioned in glass and in porphyry, stained to fit separate occasion and the right and perfect slicing of the rose-quartz from the Egyptian quarry.
…the Nordic Image is my Image and alone of all Images I would make it suitable so that the South should not laugh, so that the West should be stricken, so that the East should fall down, bearing its scented baskets of spice-pink and little roses.

--H.D. (1884-1961)