the corn.

For her, and the seed to come after whose image she bore, I have died in
tree-tops and stood long sieges in cave-mouths and on mud-walls. For her
I put the twelve signs in the sky. It was she I worshipped when I bowed
before the ten stones of jade and adored them as the moons of gestation.

Always has woman crouched close to earth like a partridge hen mothering
her young; always has my wantonness of roving led me out on the shining
ways; and always have my star-paths returned me to her, the figure
everlasting, the woman, the one woman, for whose arms I had such need
that clasped in them I have forgotten the stars.

For her I accomplished Odysseys, scaled mountains, crossed deserts; for
her I led the hunt and was forward in battle; and for her and to her I
sang my songs of the things I had done. All ecstasies of life and
rhapsodies of delight have been mine because of her. And here, at the
end, I can say that I have known no sweeter, deeper madness of being than
to drown in the fragrant glory and forgetfulness of her hair.

One word more. I remember me Dorothy, just the other day, when I still
lectured on agronomy to farmer-boy students. She was eleven years old.
Her father was dean of the college. She was a woman-child, and a woman,
and she conceived that she loved me. And I smiled to myself, for my
heart was untouched and lay elsewhere.

Yet was the smile tender, for in the child's eyes I saw the woman
eternal, the woman of all times and appearances. In her eyes I saw the
eyes of my mate of the jungle and tree-top, of the cave and the squatting-
place. In her eyes I saw the eyes of Igar when I was Ushu the archer,
the eyes of Arunga when I was the rice-harvester, the eyes of Selpa when
I dreamed of bestriding the stallion, the eyes of Nuhila who leaned to
the thrust of my sword. Yes, there was that in her eyes that made them
the eyes of Lei-Lei whom I left with a laugh on my lips, the eyes of the
Lady Om for forty years my beggar-mate on highway and byway, the eyes of
Philippa for whom I was slain on the grass in old France, the eyes of my
mother when I was the lad Jesse at the Mountain Meadows in the circle of
our forty great wagons.

She was a woman-child, but she was daughter of all women, as her mother
before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after her. She
was Sar, the corn-goddess. She was Isthar who conquered death. She was
Sheba and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Hero