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 + 

What ever had been said, sighed, sung, + 

Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed, + 

Thereon explained: “A cockerel + 

Cried 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. + 

Oh, Solomon! let us try again.” + 