  Was she so chaste? Swift and a broken rock clatters across the steep shelf of the mountain slope, sudden and swift and breaks as it clatters down into the hollow breach of the dried water-course: far and away (through fire I see it, and smoke of the dead, withered stalks of the wild cistus-brush) Hippolyta, frail and wild, galloping up the slope between great boulder and rock and group and cluster of rock. Was she so chaste, (I see it, sharp, this vision, and each fleck on the horse's flanks of foam, and bridle and bit, silver, and the straps, wrought with their perfect art, and the sun, striking athwart the silver-work, and the neck, strained forward, ears alert, and the head of a girl flung back and her throat.) Was she so chaste— (Ah, burn my fire, I ask out of the smoke-ringed darkness enclosing the flaming disk of my vision) I ask for a voice to answer: was she chaste? Who can say— the broken ridge of the hills was the line of a lover's shoulder, the sudden leap and swift thunder of mountain boulders, his laugh. She was mad— as no priest, no lover's cult could grant madness; the wine that entered her throat with the touch of the mountain rocks was white, intoxicant: she, the chaste, was betrayed by the glint of light on the hills, the granite splinter of rocks, the touch of the stone where heat melts toward the shadow-side of the rocks. |
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