You have the grace that through a book of hours
Some patient monk enscrolls on vellum fair;
Or in the imaged dawn and sunset bowers
Your figure shines in holy windows rare.
Your parted locks are radiance round your brow;
White hosts and lilies are upon your cheek;
Your forehead bears the starlight's crowning glow;
Behind you, peacock wings of splendor speak.

Your hands two lilies fold upon your breast
Veiled as two lovely and half-hidden flowers;
Cherubs with timbrels round your feet are pressed,
And angels lost amid their viol's powers.
Thus as in some mysterious triptych framed,
Your face adown from other ages shines;
Thus 'mid the gleam of some mosaic, flamed
With gold and purples, rise your beauty's shrines.

Soaring aloft to heaven in Gothic spires
Beyond the shadowed cypress groves on high,
Surge from my dream the old Chartreuse's choirs
Where you were virgin, and the abbot, I.

Putting aside my beads of olive worn,
My hands grew anxious for the brush and paint;
Light from my ogive windowed cell was borne;
The halls with laurel shadows were acquaint.
There from the stroke of dawn, the sacred hour
Of Eucharistic joy, until the bell
Of Angelus enswathed the cloister bower
With the vague sadness of its evening spell,

I painted in a fever mystical
Thy breast's enchantment all in aureole;
Decking your robe with gems purpureal,
Forming your face of hosts and roses whole.
And as I worked upon your gentle smile
And taught your forehead fairer, whiter words,
From out a cornice spoke to me the while
The singing voices of Saint Francis' birds.

Alas, my habit white! My Gothic spire!
My heavenly blues, my lilies all in flower!—
This loneliness for that old Chartreuse choir
Where you were virgin, mine the Abbot's power!—
Today is dead, the Umbrian lily, dead!
From off the friar's palette light hath fled,
Nor doth the slightest gleam of joy remain;
The bitter etching of his grief hath fed
Upon the red blood of his heart's last vein.