If Beauty Came to You by William Kean Seymour

If Beauty came to you,
Ah, would you know her grace,
And could you in your shadowed prison view
Unscathed her face?

Stepping as noiselessly
As moving moth-wings, so
Might she come suddenly to you or me
And we not know.

Amid these clangs and cries,
Alas, how should we hear
The shy, dim-woven music of her sighs
As she draws near.

Threading through monstrous, black,
Uncharitable hours,
Where the soul shapes its own abhorrèd rack
Of wasted powers?

From: Seymour, William Kean, “If Beauty Came to You” in Seymour, William Kean (ed.), Miscellany of Poetry 1919, 2011, Project Gutenberg: Salt Lake City, Utah, p. [unnumbered].
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9652/9652-h/9652-h.htm)

Date: 1919

By: William Kean Seymour (1887-1975)