Francis Thompson

“Manus Animam Pinxit”

Lady who hold’st on me dominion!
Within your spirit’s arms I stay me fast
      Against the fell
Immitigate ravening of the gates of hell;
And claim my right in you, most hardly won,
Of chaste fidelity upon the chaste:
Hold me and hold by me, lest both should fall
(O in high escalade high companion!)
Even in the breach of Heaven’s assaulted wall.
Like to a wind-sown sapling grow I from
The clift, Sweet, of your skyward-jetting soul,—
Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome
By all its clouds incumbent: O be true
To your soul, dearest, as my life to you!
For if that soil grow sterile, then the whole
Of me must shrivel, from the topmost shoot
Of climbing poesy, and my life, killed through,
Dry down and perish to the foodless root.

Sweet Summer! unto you this swallow drew,
By secret instincts inappeasable,
      That did direct him well,
Lured from his gelid North which wrought him wrong,
      Wintered of sunning song;—
By happy instincts inappeasable,
      Ah yes! that led him well,
Lured to the untried regions and the new
      Climes of auspicious you;
To twitter there, and in his singing dwell.
      But ah! if you, my Summer, should grow waste,
      With grieving skies o’ercast,
For such migration my poor wing was strong
But once; it has no power to fare again
      Forth o’er the heads of men,
Nor other Summers for its Sanctuary:
      But from your mind’s chilled sky
It needs must drop, and lie with stiffened wings
      Among your soul’s forlornest things;
A speck upon your memory, alack!
A dead fly in a dusty window-crack.

         O therefore you who are
      What words, being to such mysteries
      As raiment to the body is,
         Should rather hide than tell;
      Chaste and intelligential love:
         Whose form is as a grove
Hushed with the cooing of an unseen dove;
Whose spirit to my touch thrills purer far
Than is the tingling of a silver bell;
Whose body other ladies well might bear
As soul,—yea, which it profanation were
For all but you to take as fleshly woof,
      Being spirit truest proof;
Whose spirit sure is lineal to that
      Which sang Magnificat:
         Chastest, since such you are,
         Take this curbed spirit of mine,
Which your own eyes invest with light divine,
For lofty love and high auxiliar
         In daily exalt emprise
         Which outsoars mortal eyes;
      This soul which on your soul is laid,
      As maid’s breast against breast of maid;
Beholding how your own I have engraved
On it, and with what purging thoughts have laved
This love of mine from all mortality
Indeed the copy is a painful one,
         And with long labour done!
O if you doubt the thing you are, lady,
         Come then, and look in me;
Your beauty, Dian, dress and contemplate
Within a pool to Dian consecrate!
Unveil this spirit, lady, when you will,
For unto all but you ’tis veilèd still:
Unveil, and fearless gaze there, you alone,
And if you love the image—’tis your own!