SOLOMON AND THE WITCH
 
 AND thus declared that Arab lady:
 "Last night, where under the wild moon
 On grassy mattress I had laid me,
 Within my arms great Solomon,
 I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue
 Not his, not mine."
 Who understood
 Whatever has been said, sighed, sung,
 Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed,
 Thereon replied:  "A cockerel
 Crew from a blossoming apple bough
 Three hundred years before the Fall,
 And never crew again till now,
 And would not now but that he thought,
 Chance being at one with Choice at last,
 All that the brigand apple brought
 And this foul world were dead at last.
 He that crowed out eternity
 Thought to have crowed it in again.
 For though love has a spider's eye
 To find out some appropriate pain –
 Aye, though all passion's in the glance –
 For every nerve, and tests a lover
 With cruelties of Choice and Chance;
 And when at last that murder's over
 Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
 For each an imagined image brings
 And finds a real image there;
 Yet the world ends when these two things,
 Though several, are a single light,
 When oil and wick are burned in one;
 Therefore a blessed moon last night
 Gave Sheba to her Solomon.'
 "Yet the world stays.'
 "If that be so,
 Your cockerel found us in the wrong
 Although he thought it.  worth a crow.
 Maybe an image is too strong
 Or maybe is not strong enough.'
 "The night has fallen; not a sound
 In the forbidden sacred grove
 Unless a petal hit the ground,
 Nor any human sight within it
 But the crushed grass where we have lain!
 And the moon is wilder every minute.
 O! Solomon! let us try again.'