• Could you not drink her gaze like wine?
• Yet, though their splendour swoon
• Into the lamplight languidly
• As a tune into a tune,
• Those eyes are wide and clear, as if
• They saw the stars at noon.

• The gold that's heaped beside her hand,
• In truth, rich prize it were;
• And rich the dreams that wreathe her brows
• 10 With magic silence there;
• And he were rich who should unwind
• That woven golden hair.

• Some music surely fans the sense,
• A breath like closing plumes:
• You know it by the spark called up
• From her eyes' purple glooms;
• You almost feel the instant thrill
• Pulse through the lighted rooms.

• And surely, where she sits, the dance
• 20Now pants its eager heat:
• But not more lightly or more true
• Fall there the dancers' feet,
• Than fall her cards upon the board
• As 'twere a heart that beat.

• Her fingers let them softly through,—
• Smooth, polished, silent things;
• And each one, as it falls, reflects,
• In swift light-shadowings,
• Crimson and orange, green and blue,
• 30 The great eyes of her rings.

• Whom plays she with?—With thee: thou lov'st
• Those gems upon her hand.
• With me: I search her secret will.
• All deem her bosom grand.
• We play together, she and we,
• Within a vain strange land:—

• A land without any order,
• Whose substance is as breath;
• Where one lying down ariseth not
• Nor the sleeper awakeneth;
• 40A land of darkness, as darkness itself,
• And of the shadow of death.

• What be her cards, you ask? Even these:—
• The heart, that does but crave
• More, being fed; the diamond,
• Skilled to make base seem brave;
• The club, for smiting in the dark;
• The spade, to dig a grave.

• And do you ask, what game she plays?
• With him, 'tis lost or won;

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Transcribed Footnote (page 1147):

* The picture is one painted by the late Theodore von

Holst; and represents a beautiful woman, richly dressed,

who is sitting at a lamp-lit table, dealing out cards, with a

peculiar fixedness of expression.



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Column Break



Note: The poem continues onto the second column starting here.
• 50With him it is playing still; with him,
• It is not yet begun;
• But 'tis a game she plays with all,
• The game of Twenty-One.

H. H. H.

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