It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.

VII

The mules that angels ride come slowly down

The blazing passes, from beyond the sun.

Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive.

These muleteers are dainty of their way.

Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat

Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.

This parable, in sense, amounts to this:

The honey of heaven may or may not come,

But that of earth both comes and goes at once.

Suppose these couriers brought amid their train

A damsel heightened by eternal bloom.

VIII

Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,

An ancient aspect touching a new mind.

It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.

This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Two golden gourds distended on our vines,

Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,

Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.

We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,

The laughing sky will see the two of us

Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

IX

In verses wild with motion, full of din,

Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure

As the deadly thought of men accomplishing

Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate

The faith of forty, ward of Cupido.

Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit

Is not too lusty for your broadening.

I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything

For the music and manner of the paladins

To make oblation fit. Where shall I find

Bravura adequate to this great hymn?

X

The fops of fancy in their poems leave

Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,

Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.

I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.

I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,

No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.

But, after all, I know a tree that bears

A semblance to the thing I have in mind.

It stands gigantic, with a certain tip

To which all birds come sometime in their time.

But when they go that tip still tips the tree.

XI

If sex were all, then every trembling hand

Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,

That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout

Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth

From madness or delight, without regard

To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!

Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink,

Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,

Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog

Boomed from his very belly odious chords.

XII

A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,

On sidelong wing, around and round and round.

A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,

Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I

Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,

In lordly study. Every day, I found

Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.

Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,

And still pursue, the origin and course

Of love, but until now I never knew