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Robert Laurence Binyon - The Tiger—Lily
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What wouldst thou with me? By what spell
 My spirit allure, absorb, compel?
 The last long beam that thou didst drink
 Is buried now on evening`s brink.
 The garden`s leafy alleys lone,
 With shadowy stem and mossy stone,
 Intangibly seem now to dress
 Colour and odour motionless.
 A stealing darkness breathes around,
 As if it rose out of the ground,
 And tingeing into it soft gold
 Ebbs, and the dewy green glooms cold,
 And dim boughs into black retire.
 But thou, seven--throated Flower of Fire,
 Sombring all the shadows near thee,
 Dost still, as if the night did fear thee,
 Glory amid the failing hues
 And this invading dusk refuse,
 And breathing out thy languid spice
 My spirit to thine own entice.

 Warm wafts that linger touch my cheek.
 What is it in me thou wouldst seek?
 Thou meltest all my thoughts away
 As leaf on leaf is mingled grey
 In shadow on shadow, past discerning.
 O cold to touch, to vision burning,
 What power is in thee so to change
 And my familiar sense estrange?
 Thou seemest born within a mind
 That has no ken of human kind;
 Remote from quick heart, curious brain,
 Feeling in joy, thinking in pain,
 Remote as beauty of sleeping snow
 Is from a flame`s wild shredded glow;
 Remote from mirth, anger or care,
 Or the deep wound and want of prayer,
 Yet like some word of splendid speech
 Beyond our human hearing`s reach,
 Whose meaning, could its sound be known,
 Might earth`s imprisoned secret own
 That binds as with a viewless thread
 This throbbing heart of joy and dread
 With tremblings of the wayside grass
 And pillars of the mountain pass
 And circling of the stars extreme
     In boundless heights of heaven. I dream
 My dark heart into earth, I heap
 My spirit over with cold sleep,
 Resign my senses, one by one,
 To glooms that never saw the sun,
 Fade from this self to what behind
 Earth`s myriad shapes is urging blind,
 Am emptied of man`s name, become
 A blankness, as the mountain dumb,
 If so I may attain to win
 The secret thou art rooted in.

 Can life renounce not life? Must still
 The inexorably moving will
 Seek and make rankle the dulled sting
 Of essence? Must the desert spring
 Revive, and the forgotten seed
 Be drawn again by its old need
 Through blind beginnings of a sense,
 And dark desire of difference,
 And fear, and hope that feeds on fear,
 To its own destined character?
 I cannot lose nor abdicate
 The separateness of my state,
 Nor thou, that out of burial drawn
 Through the black earth didst shoot and dawn
 Tender and small and green, and mount
 In air, a springing, silent fount,
 Until the cold bud, sheathed so long,
 Slow swelled and burst like sudden song
 Into the sun`s delight, and naught
 Of costliest tissue ever wrought,
 Fragrant and in rare colours dyed,
 For the white body of a bride
 Or king`s anointing feast, could so
 Enrich the noon or inly glow
 To lose the sweetly--kindled sense
 In mystery of magnificence.

 Was there no cost to make thee fair?
 Did no far--off long pains prepare
 Those clustered curves of incense--breath?
 Did nothing suffer unto death
 To poise thee in thy glory? Came
 No tinge upon thy coloured flame
 From sighs? Was there no bosom bled
 That thou mightest be perfected--
 As, serving some taskmaster`s doom
 A brown slave patient at the loom
 Toils, weaving his fine web of gold,
 More precious than his race, to fold
 In soft attire an idle queen,
 When long his own thin hands have been
 Dust, but in all their toil arrayed
 She through her pillared palace--shade
 Glows flower--like, and her young gaze has
 No thought of any deep Alas!
 Threaded into the sumptuous vest
 That lies upon her perfumed breast;
 Or as at crimsoned eve on high
 Some dying warrior turns his eye
 Where, lifted over spear and sword
 Among the loud victorious horde,
 A golden trophy gleams with blood
 That from his own spent body flowed,
 And trumpets sound across the sand
 To sunset in a conquered land?

 O thou wast from life`s weltering ore
 Breathed by enchanting mind before
 Man was in his own shape. Far, far
 Thou seemest as the evening star!
 Yet movest me like that lone light
 Fetched through the ages of the night
 Into this breathing garden--close;
 Or like the things that no man knows
 In a child`s eyes; or like, for one
 Watching a seaward--sinking sun,
 Beyond cold wastes of water pale
 The dim communion of a sail.
 Ah! though I know not what thou art,
 Yet in the fastness of my heart
 How shall I tell what lies unwrought
 Into the figured films of thought,
 Uncoloured yet by sharp or sweet,
 Or what forge of transforming heat
 Threatens this world of use and fact
 Wherewith the busy brain is packed?
 Thou art of me, O Flower of Flame,
 What is not uttered, has no name,
 The springing of a want unmated,
 A joy no fallen hour has dated.
 Some of my mystery thou holdest,
 Secretly, splendidly unfoldest.
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