Explore "The Kiss" by Robert Graves on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Are you shaken, are you stirred / By a whisper of love, / Spellbound to a word / Does Time cease to move, / Till her calm grey eye / Expands to a sky / And the clouds of her hair / Like storms go by?
Then the lips that you have kissed / Turn to frost and fire, / And a white-steaming mist / Obscures desire: / So back to their birth / Fade water, air, earth, / And the First Power moves / Over void and dearth.
Is that Love? no, but Death, / A passion, a shout, / The deep in-breath, / The breath roaring out, / And once that is flown, / You must lie alone, / Without hope, without life, / Poor flesh, sad bone.