Classic Poem

(1)

He leans against the window-sill:
The dusk has drizzled down to rose.
Delicious damps and odors fill
The musings of his thoughtful nose.

The soft wind slides seductive touch
Along the shoulders of the oak.
My dear, I love you, dear, so much—
He cannot think of whom he spoke.

(2)

The white of her Colonial
Showed patterns of a tranquil wall
Through lattices of apple trees,
And softly her serenities
Curled hazy blue above the backs
Of comfortable chimney stacks.
New England, not Areadia,
She gardened her phenomena,
And tamed her asphodels to grow
To roses in a scarlet row.
New England fenced from Avalon,
The curtains of her peace were drawn
Against the peering of the moon,
And crickets shuffled down the tune
Of Pan among the lilac leaves.
From far away he saw her eaves
As shelter against every doubt,
And understood what was shut out
When doors swung back to shut him in,—
But what of that! It was no sin
To bolt with iron from the blaze
Of staring moon on empty ways
And bar the shutters to the sound
Of cloven feet on hollow ground,—
And after by the friendly stove
Sit peacefully and sup of love.

(3)

No doubt he'd once had eyes to see
Through mill-stones to the mystery
That mill-stones might perhaps intend
If there were Ends beyond the end—
But now he had no plague of eyes.

There was a way of being wise
That was not wisdom: one might love
Too loftily and fall above
As well as one might fall below.

And there were things a man might know
That were not knowledge either.
Truth
For instance.
One's ecstatic youth
Proves true what has no proof in sense:
And time strikes out the evidence
But enters judgment on the rule,
So that one's wisdom, learned fool,
Knows only that the thing is true.
But he had knowledge, for he knew
His proofs and never tried their weight
As evidence to demonstrate
The truth of anything on earth
Except themselves, and what was worth
Believing of them.
She was real:
He knew because his hands could feel
The bones that threatened in her wrist.
And she proved nothing but the twist
That was her way of beauty—not
Some Beauty that he had forgot
Nor Truth that now was past belief.
A woman was no lawyer's brief
Compounded to persuade the sense
Of things beyond experience
No woman's body could fulfil,
But Holy Writ that can distil
The very peace it promises.

Once he had seen the Thing That Is
In every movement of her head—

He yawned and shuffled off to bed.

(4)

The humid air precipitates
In moisture on enamelled plates
And orient to opaline
The glass discolors. Crinkled green
Of lettuces grows limp and fades.
A rose bowl withering pervades
The room with sickliness and rusts
The whiteness crimson. Glutted lusts,
Renewing on a deeper nerve,
Denied, make conversation serve
Obscurer converse. Intimate,
Their meeting eyes interrogate
And being answered turn aside,
She secretly and satisfied,
He startled into discontent
By something in her quick assent,
Confided and discreetly masked,
That seemed to promise all he asked.

(5)

Beside her in the dark the chime
Of ratcheted revolving time
Repeating its repeated beat
Builds complicated incomplete
Sonatas in his listening brain,
Phrase upon phrase, till the refrain
Resolves into the tick and tock
Of seconds scissored by the clock.

He thinks he has composed his dream
Of love upon as slight a theme,
And all the arduous obscure
Perfections of his overture,
Unravelled part from varied part,
Were but the drumming of her heart.

But still the clacking clockwork spins
Music of marvellous violins.

(6)

Beauty is that Medusa's head
Which men go armed to seek and sever:
It is most deadly when most dead,
And dead will stare and sting forever—
Beauty is that Medusa's head.