A world of woes and of fears and sighs
And love that better had been hate,
And crimes and wars and victories,
And the painful fall of many a state –
All these and more that the heart abate
My raving soul in thy hand descrie
No painter mad, not a fetichist
O'er thy hand would be thus held blin
At mere blank thought of its being kissed
By my lips I thrill with a fear none find
In the waking thoughts-of a human mind
Save when reason by its own self is misse
Thy hand has a meaning thou dost not know,
A meaning deeper than human fears;
It has aught of the sea and of the sun's glow
And the seasons too and the months and years,
And the colour hidden in human tears
And the form and number in human wo
Thy hand was a lofty and empty home,
A collar of pearls and a castle keep;
Thy hand knows well all the thoughts that roam,
Thy hand is the music eternal and deep
That long ere birth held my soul asleep
In a palace quaint with a curious dom
How finely made is this hand of thine
With its fingers tapering and white,
Soft and palely warm and fine;
There is something in it of day and nigh
Ah, dearest child, could I read aright
The text before me deep and divin
There's a kind of Fact that persists and hangs
O'er thy hand, as on a scratched scroll:
Tis as if some thought had buried its fangs
In a unknown part of my sou
In a land far in me a bell doth toll,
And my heart aches wild as it shrinks or clang
There is aught of new and wild and unreal
In thy hand where my look is pained:
Tis as if hand in itself could see all
Horrible thought, where fear is gained
By a drollness mad and dimly sustained
As of some wide hint out of the Idea
There is aught of Personal, of It, of Such
In thy hand o'er me there steals
A sense of dread like a murder's clutch;
I know not how, my hand in thine feels
An eternal thing hand my mad brain reels
As if eternity we could touc
I see that hand not a hand, but whence
This horrible Fact that creeps in me!
Ah, I have of thy hand the seeing intense
But aught more than hand in that place I see
That abrupt elusion did make to be
Between thought of things and what we call sens
My thought doth look at thy hand direct
Without eyes or sense or aught of this,
And my reason at such a thing is wrecked
Into such a fear that both pain hand bliss
Are plunged in conscious unconsciousness
For that is no hand that my dreams detec
And I gaze yet more hand I shake from me
The dream of time and the dream of space,
And as a drowner who sinks in the sea
I dream of the wonders of all we trace
In everything and I plunge full-face
In the sense of what more than seems to b
There is aught of lovely, wild and unbrute
In thy hand, and I love it well;