Page 3 of 42 CHARMIDES - Charmides and Other Poems

Those who have never known a lover's sin Let them not read my ditty, it will be To their dull ears so musicless and thin That they will have no joy of it, but ye To whose wan cheeks now creeps the lingering smile, Ye who have learned who Eros is, - O listen yet awhile.

A little space he let his greedy eyes Rest on the burnished image, till mere sight Half swooned for surfeit of such luxuries, And then his lips in hungering delight Fed on her lips, and round the towered neck He flung his arms, nor cared at all his passion's will to check.

Never I ween did lover hold such tryst, For all night long he murmured honeyed word, And saw her sweet unravished limbs, and kissed Her pale and argent body undisturbed, And paddled with the polished throat, and pressed His hot and beating heart upon her chill and icy breast.

It was as if Numidian javelins Pierced through and through his wild and whirling brain, And his nerves thrilled like throbbing violins In exquisite pulsation, and the pain Was such sweet anguish that he never drew His lips from hers till overhead the lark of warning flew.

They who have never seen the daylight peer Into a darkened room, and drawn the curtain, And with dull eyes and wearied from some dear And worshipped body risen, they for certain Will never know of what I try to sing, How long the last kiss was, how fond and late his lingering.

The moon was girdled with a crystal rim, The sign which shipmen say is ominous Of wrath in heaven, the wan stars were dim, And the low lightening east was tremulous With the faint fluttering wings of flying dawn, Ere from the silent sombre shrine his lover had withdrawn.

Down the steep rock with hurried feet and fast Clomb the brave lad, and reached the cave of Pan, And heard the goat-foot snoring as he passed, And leapt upon a grassy knoll and ran Like a young fawn unto an olive wood Which in a shady valley by the well-built city stood;

And sought a little stream, which well he knew, For oftentimes with boyish careless shout The green and crested grebe he would pursue, Or snare in woven net the silver trout, And down amid the startled reeds he lay Panting in breathless sweet affright, and waited for the day.

On the green bank he lay, and let one hand Dip in the cool dark eddies listlessly, And soon the breath of morning came and fanned His hot flushed cheeks, or lifted wantonly The tangled curls from off his forehead, while He on the running water gazed with strange and secret smile.

And soon the shepherd in rough woollen cloak With his long crook undid the wattled cotes, And from the stack a thin blue wreath of smoke Curled through the air across the ripening oats, And on the hill the yellow house-dog bayed As through the crisp and rustling fern the heavy cattle strayed.

And when the light-foot mower went afield Across the meadows laced with threaded dew, And the sheep bleated on the misty weald, And from its nest the waking corncrake flew, Some woodmen saw him lying by the stream And marvelled much that any lad so beautiful could seem,

		The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg