Thorgerda
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Thorgerda is a 19th-century poem by John Payne. The subject of the poem, Thorgerda, is a woman who threatens to commit suicide in the Egils Saga.
- LO, what a golden day it is!
- The glad sun rives the sapphire deeps
- Down to the dim pearl-floor’d abyss
- Where, cold in death, my lover sleeps;
- Crowns with soft fire his sea-drench’d hair,
- Kisses with gold his lips death-pale,
- Lets down from heaven a golden stair,
- Whose steps methinks his soul doth scale.
- This is my treasure. White and sweet,
- He lies beneath my ardent eyne,
- With heart that nevermore shall beat,
- Nor lips press softly against mine.
- How like a dream it seems to me,
- The time when hand in hand we went
- By hill and valley, I and he,
- Lost in a trance of ravishment!
- I and my lover here that lies
- And sleeps the everlasting sleep,
- We walk’d whilere in Paradise;
- (Can it be true?) Our souls drank deep
- Together of Love’s wonder-wine:
- We saw the golden days go by,
- Unheeding, for we were divine;
- Love had advanced us to the sky.
- And of that time no traces bin,
- Save the still shape that once did hold
- My lover’s soul, that shone therein,
- As wine laughs in a vase of gold.
- Cold, cold he lies, and answers not
- Unto my speech; his mouth is cold
- Whose kiss to mine was sweet and hot
- As sunshine to a marigold.
- And yet his pallid lips I press;
- I fold his neck in my embrace;
- I rain down kisses none the less
- Upon his unresponsive face:
- I call on him with all the fair
- Flower-names that blossom out of love;
- I knit sea-jewels in his hair;
- I weave fair coronals above
- The cold, sweet silver of his brow:
- For this is all of him I have;
- Nor any Future more than now
- Shall give me back what Love once gave.
- For from Death’s gate our lives divide;
- His was the Galilean’s faith:
- With those that serve the Crucified,
- He shar’d the chance of Life and Death.
- And so my eyes shall never light
- Upon his star-soft eyes again;
- Nor ever in the day or night,
- By hill or valley, wood or plain,
- Our hands shall meet afresh. His voice
- Shall never with its silver tone
- The sadness of my soul rejoice,
- Nor his breast throb against my own.
- His sight shall never unto me
- Return whilst heaven and earth remain:
- Though Time blend with Eternity,
- Our lives shall never meet again,—
- Never by gray or purple sea,
- Never again in heavens of blue,
- Never in this old earth—ah me!
- Never, ah never! in the new.
- For me, he treads the windless ways
- Among the thick star-diamonds,
- Where in the middle æther blaze
- The Golden City’s pearl gate-fronds;
- Sitteth, palm-crown’d and silver-shod,
- Where in strange dwellings of the skies
- The Christians to their Woman-God
- Cease nevermore from psalmodies.
- And I, I wait, with haggard eyes
- And face grown awful for desire,
- The coming of that fierce day’s rise
- When from the cities of the fire
- The Wolf shall come with blazing crest,
- And many a giant arm’d for war;
- When from the sanguine-streaming West,
- Hell-flaming, speedeth Naglfar.