e that, like a great sea,
Girds in me a great red empire more broad
Than all the lands and peoples that are in
My power's reach. Thus art thou myself made
In that great stretch Olympic that betrays
The true-wholed gods present in river and glade
And hours eternal in its different days.

"So strong my love is that it is thyself,
Thy body as it was ere death was it,
Towering above the silence infinite
That girds round life and its unduring pelf.
Even as thou wert in life, thy corporal shade
Is in the presence of the gods. My love
Permits not that its carnal being fade
Or one whit false to fleshly presence prove.
Creeds may arise and pass, and passions change,
Other ways may be born out of Time's dream,
But this our love, made but thy body, 'll range
On deathless meads from happy stream to stream.

"Were there no Olympus for thee, my love
Would make thee one, where thou sole god mightst prove,
And I thy sole adorer, glad to be
Thy sole adorer through infinity.
That were a divine universe enough
For love and me and what to me thou art.
To have thee is a thing made of gods' stuff
And to look on thee eternity's best part.

"O love, my love! Awake with my strong will
Of loving to Olympus and be there
The latest god, whose honey-coloured hair
Takes divine eyes! As thou wert on earth, still
In heaven bodifully be and roam,
A prisoner of that happiness of home,
With elder gods, while I on earth do make
A statue for thy deathlessness' seen sake.

"That deathless statue of thee I shall build
Will be no stone thing, but my great regret
By which our love's eternity is willed.
My sorrow shall make thee its god, and set
Thy naked presence on the parapet
That looks over the seas of future times.
Some shall say all our love was vice and crimes.
Others against our names, as stones, shall whet
The knife of their glad hate of beauty, and make
Our name a pillory, a scaffold and a stake
Whereon to burn our brothers yet unborn.
Yet shall our presence, like eternal morn,
Ever return at Beauty's hour, and shine
Out of the East of Love, and be the shrine
Of future gods that nothing human scorn.

"My love for thee is part of what thou wert
And shall be part of what thy statue will be.
Our double presence unified in thee
Shall make to beat many a future heart.
Ay, were't a statue to be broken and missed,
Yet its stone-perfect memory
Would, still more perfect, on Time's shoulders borne,
Overlook the great Morn
From an etern