He followed into a maze to imagine
the mixed beauty that was always his;
leaves trembled like disheveled mirrors,
the signet rock sank in the forest,
the plundered stones from pouring streams
blazed black to a mock richness.
He dropped, stunned by the green eye of one:
"I am what I see and who sees me.
I am the invisible mouth of the dewberry,
and the bridled root of a Pegasus tree.
Lift the fairy roofs of dead flowers
and you will find my heart crouching there.
Or, sucking the waters of a poisoned thorn,
I am the jealous lover of Pan."
Now, the god plagued him near,
cruel and rare as the end of desire.
Fallen from hope, gored in black swamp,
his hand pointed down to the way he had come.
Green fingers twined, the forest groaned;
and he was drawn like the hollow rain
into his last love, and lost being.
THE CLOISTERS
And quiet here, the sea-shell murmuring crowd
swings upon a silken-corded shore,
our shoes like music 'on the stony floor.
Twice turned on stone, we mark a figure bowed
with wooden head and crowned in thorny gold.
And from the posture of an ancient chair
we reconstruct a king who dawdled there.
The sculptor of the mind designs his cold
and cryptic image from the ceiling light.
Now, changed by the mind's unbounded art,
the battered whole turns into beauty's part:
the shining center of an unknown weight.
