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Home  »  The New Poetry  »  To Celia

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

To Celia

By Witter Bynner

I. Consummation

THERE was a strangeness on your lips,

Lips that had been so sure;

You still were mine but in eclipse,

Beside me but obscure.

There was a cloud upon your heart;

For, Celia, where you lay,

Death, come to break your life apart,

Had led your love away.

Through the cold distance of your eyes

You could no longer see.

But when you died, you heard me rise

And followed suddenly.

And close beside me, looking down

As I did on the dead,

You made of time a wedding-gown,

Of space a marriage-bed.

I took, in you, death for a wife,

You married death in me,

Singing, “There is no other life,

No other God than we!”