Epithalamium and Elegy

Witter Bynner

My single constancy is love of life:
Because we have entered no such formal pact
As dulls devotion between man and wife-
No bland acknowledgment, no binding fact,
No mingling of betrothal with divorce,
No dated bliss, no midnight certitude,
No sad necessity, no matter-of-course,
No pallid wonder why we ever wooed;
Because she lets me love her as I can,
Moment by moment-moments that always come
Beyond the calculation of a man
For joy or pain, for epithalamium
Or for elegy; and because, when I am spent,
Life shall have had her way, shall be content
Still to confer the sweet bewilderment
On someone else, shall loosen her lovely hair
To the wind, shall turn with bountiful intent
Toward anyone at all, and I not there,
Shall offer cool papayas, pale bamboo
And amorous guava to a later comer,
And none of her gifts, not even a drop of dew,
To me who had received them many a summer.

These are not harlotries but only joy,
These are the very tiptoes of delight.
This is the happiness she gives to a boy,

 With nothing of wickedness, nothing of spite
 In that immense delicious naked bed
 Where anyone may lie, except the dead. . . .

- But I shall leave her. All that there is of rest
 Shall be little enough, after so much of love.
 Wherever I move, she is there. Her open breast
 Offers the tenderness I am dying of.
 Her arm along my body like a snake
 Has softly wound me into rings of sleep,
 And every time again stings me awake
 And drowns me in her rhythms deep and deep. . . .
 Can I be tragical, in having had
 My love of life by life herself subdued?
 Though I be satiate, how can I be sad
 In leaving? All there is of solitude
 Shall be little enough after this vast embrace.
 Give her some younger lover in my place.