Classic Poem

I saw it; low she lay as one in dreams,
And round that holy hair, round and beyond
My Frances, my inviolable, screamed
The scandal of the dead men's demi-monde.

Close to that face, a window into heaven,
Close to the hair's brown surf of broken waves
I saw the idiot faces of the ghosts
That are the fungus, not the flower, of graves.

You whom the pinewoods robed in sun and shade
You who were sceptred with thistle's bloom,
God's thunder! What have you to do with these
The lying crystal and the darkened room.

Leave the weird queens that find the sun too strong,
To mope and cower beneath Druidic trees,
The still, sweet gardens of the dastard's dream.
God's thunder! What have you to do with these?

Low fields and shining lie in crystal-land
Peace and strange pleasure: wonder-lands untrod,
But not plain words, nor love of open things,
Truth, nor strong laughter, nor the fear of God.

I will not look: I am a child of earth,
I see the sun and wood, the sea, and grass.
I only saw one spirit. She is there
Staring for spirits in a lump of glass.