Leaving Martindale by Kathleen Raine

SHALL I be true
As these hills bind me
As these skies find me,
As waters weather me,
As leaves crown me?
My kiss keep faith
With death and birth, 

My joy with pain, 

My heaven with earth?

I love you as the air
Enfolds the earth,
As darkness holds a star,
As waters, life.
You are the smiling heart, 

The sunlit noon
Of one who soon must sleep
Her death alone.

Shall I be true?

Love binds in vain
Whom death must loose -
The flesh, the pain
That knows you now
Soon will not know
That love must pass,
That times must go.

Reading backwards in her Guardian obituary (born June 14 1908; died July 6 2003): "After her greatest love - for the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring Of Bright Water - proved disastrous, she renounced personal emotions, and judged her own part in these dramas with ruthless severity. Threads of sorrow, regret and loneliness run through her four volumes of autobiography, as well as through her poetry. Among the unpublished poems she chose for her last collection of poems (in 2000) were the lines: "Being what I am/ What could I do but wrong?""

Also,

"...her spirit was more at home in the eastern traditions and the world view of Plato, Plotinus and the 18th-century English Platonist Thomas Taylor, on all of whom she produced scholarly studies. She drew Jungian psychology into her poetic vision of the divinity manifest in nature and the cosmos, and the "perennial wisdom" and spiritual symbols common to all religions, peoples and times.

These enthusiasms did not make her popular in her own culture, whose scorn she robustly reciprocated. She minded that Roy Fuller was preferred to herself as Edmund Blunden's successor for the Oxford poetry chair in 1968. In 1991, she declined the Royal Society of Literature's companionship of literature when she realised it had already been given to Anthony Burgess and Iris Murdoch, whom she dismissed as journalists."

Plus,

"William Blake was her master, and she shared his belief that "one power alone makes a poet - imagination, the divine vision". As WB Yeats, her other great exemplar, put it, "poetry and religion are the same thing". To this vision she committed not only her poetry and erudition, but her whole life. She stood as a witness to spiritual values in a society that rejected them."