[Editor: This poem by John Shaw Neilson was published in Collected Poems of John Shaw Neilson (1934).]
Those Shaded Eyes
Eyes of a damsel
In the ungoverned Spring
Would send me the long roads
Adventuring!
Reason the unwelcome
As a coward cries,
“Look not too long under
Those shaded eyes!”
Eyes so shaded
Do me inspire
As the falling water,
The blue ways of fire.
Full eyes burn over
The fallen mind,
Bid the dumb utter
Thoughts to the blind.
Such eyes give dreaming
Of lights that grew
Flowers on the darkness
Ere the wind blew.
Eyes so shaded
To me display
Doves in the white of Heaven,
Death in his day.
Eyes so shaded
To me declare
Heights, and the birds loving,
Hollows of prayer.
Reason the unwelcome
As a coward cries,
“Look not too long under
Those shaded eyes!”
But my heart is singing,
“Oh, the green gown!
The woe . . . the sweet weather . . .
The tears on a town.”
Source:
John Shaw Neilson (editor: R. H. Croll), Collected Poems of John Shaw Neilson, Melbourne: Lothian Publishing Company, 1934 [May 1949 reprint], pages 120-121
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