Under the Mistletoe

Southland Times, Issue 21273, 19 December 1930, Page 17

Under the Mistletoe

Kisses in Poetry

Kisses have inspired many poets, and Mr W. C. Hartog’s anthology, “The Kiss in English Poetry” is a mine of pleasure. All the world remembers the following scene of "Romeo and Juliet” Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take. Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purg’d. Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took. Romeo: Sin from my lips? 0 trespass sweetly urg’d. Give me my sin again. Ben Jonson wrote in “Cynthia’s Revels”: O that joy so soon should waste! Or so sweet a bliss As a kiss Might not for ever last! So sugared, so melting, so soft, so delic- - > ious. The dew that lies on roses ■ When the morn herself discloses, Is not so precious. O, rather than I would it smother. Were I to taste such another, It should be my washing That I might die with kissing. Robert Herrick defines a kiss as follows: What is a kiss? Why this, as some approve, The sure sweet cement, glue, and' lime of love. Leigh Hunt. Leigh Hunt wrote:—. - Jenny kiss’d me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; • Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in! Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, Say that health and wealth have miss’d me, Say I’m growing old, but add, Jenny kiss’d me. Byron, in “Don Juan,” describes a kiss in wonderful lines:— A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth and love And beauty, all concentrating like rays Into one focus, kindled from above; Such kisses as belong to early days, Where heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move, And the blood’s lava, and the pulse a ■blaze, ■ Each kiss a heart-quake,—for a kiss’s . strength. I think, it must be reckon’d by its length. Shelley.

In “Love’s Philosophy,” Shelley has written :— See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea; What are all these kissings worth, ' If thou kiss not me? There is a delightful description of kisses in Gabriel Rossetti’s “Willow Wood”:— I sit with Love, upon a woodside well, Leaning across the water, I and he; Nor ever did he speak nor looked at me, But touched his lute wherein was audible The certain secret thing he had to tell: ’ Only our mirrored eyes met silently In the low wave; and that sound came to be The passionate voice I knew; and my tears fell. And at this fall, his eyes beneath grew hers; And with his foot and with his wing-feathers He swept the spring that watered my heart’s drouth. Then the dark ripples spread to waving hair, And as I stooped, her own lips rising there, . • Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth. Light, but nevertheless charming, are these lines of Sara Teasdale:—: ■ Strephoh kissed me in the spring, Robin in the fall, But Colin only looked at me And never kissed at all. Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest, ,Robin’s lost in play, But the kiss in Colin’s eyes, Haunts me night and day. In “The Story of Bhanavar the Beautiful,” George Meredith has these fine lines. — I thought not to love again! But now I love as I loved not before; I love not: I adore: O my beloved, kiss, kiss me! waste thy kisses like a rain Are not thy rgd lips fain? Oh, and so softly they greet I In “Paola and Francesca,” Paolo says:— And in that kiss our souls Together flashed, and now they, are one flame, Which nothing can put out, nothing divide. |