Epithalamium and Elegy

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.