Death Portraits: The Divorcée

I knew that her face would look just as it does.
Death has not chiselled a wonder of it away.
Rather each line seems given the power to stay
Just as it was—by merciful delusion
That comes before decay.
Her lips are a little withered, it is true—
As lips must be when with all wanting through—
And her eyes are leaden now under her lids;
No glance of them for adoration bids.
Strange that it should be so, for the first time!
And stranger that the lure of her is gone.
None would believe, seeing chaste silence on
Her brow, that naked thoughts once ran in her brain
With a wild and bold and bacchanal disdain
Of chastity—after she failed to gain
In marriage the mated love of which she was fain.
For, spite of all, she was the kind of woman
Who loves but one man, be he god or devil,
And her husband could have led her to any revel,
Of Heaven or Hell,
Had he not left her—as was merely human—
Revolted by an amorousness that clung to him
Cloying, or that resentful flung to him
Reminders of the adorers who desired her—
Left her and sought another with cool hands
And quiet lips, whose kiss made no demands.
And so as she lies thus tranquilly at last,
With calm hands cooler than that other wife's,
You must know all the sad and desperate strifes
She drowned in drugged oblivion ere she passed,
To know that the look which lingers on her face
Is unawareness that the infinite change
From time to eternity has taken place.
She is her frozen self, ignorant still
Of Life's or Dissolution's ultimate will,
And only the lily-pall on her seems strange.