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stroking
His soft hair’s yellow sheen)
His bright youth will be metal
No alchemist has seen.
    His mother said: I’ll give him
A brave and high desire,
’Till all the dross of living
Burns clean within his fire.
He’ll be strong and merry
And he’ll be clean and brave,
And all the world will rue it
When he is dark in grave.
    But dark will treat him kinder
Than man would anywhere
(With barren winds to rock him
—Though now he doesn’t care—
And hushed and haughty starlight
To stroke his golden hair)
    Mankind called him felon
And hanged him stark and high
Where four winds could watch him
Troubled on the sky.
    Once he was quick and golden,
Once he was clean and brave.
Earth, you dreamed and shaped him:
Will you deny him grave?
    Being dead he will forgive you
And all that you have done,
But he’ll curse you if you leave him
Grinning at the sun.

XV
    B ONNY earth and bonny sky
And bonny was the sweep
Of sun and rain in apple trees
While I was yet asleep.
    And bonny earth and bonny sky
And bonny’ll be the rain
And sun among the apple trees
When I’ve long slept again.

XVI
    B EHOLD me, in my feathered cap and doublet,
strutting across this stage that men call living:
the mirror of all youth and hope and striving.
Even you, in me, become a grimace.”
    “Ay, in that belief you too are but a mortal,
thinking that peace and quietude and silence
are but the shadows of your little gestures
upon the wall of breathing that surrounds you.”
    “Ho, old spectre, solemnly ribbed with wisdom!
D’ye think that I must feel your dark compulsions
and flee with kings and queens in whistling darkness?
I am star, and sun, and moon, and laughter.”
    “What star is there that falls, with none to watch it?
What sun is there more permanent than darkness?
What moon is there that cracks not? ay, what laughter,
what purse is there that empties not with spending?”
    “Ho.… One grows weary, posturing and grinning,
aping a dream to a house of peopled shadows!
Ah, ’twas you who stripped me bare and set me
gibbering at mine own face in a mirror.”
    “Yes, it is I who, in the world’s clear evening
with a silver star like a rose in a bowl of lacquer,
when you have played your play and at last are quiet,
will wait for you with sleep, and you can drown.”

XVII
    o atthis
for a moment an aeon i pause plunging
above the narrow precipice of thy breast
    what before thy white precipice the eagle
sharp in the sunlight and cleaving
his long blue ecstasy and what
wind on hilltops blond with the wings of the morning
what wind o atthis sweeping the april to lesbos
whitening the seas

XVIII
    O NCE upon an adolescent hill
There lay a lad who watched amid the piled
And silver shapes of aircarved cumulae
A lone uncleaving eagle, and the still
Serenely blue dissolving of desire.
    Easeful valleys of the earth had been: he looked not back,
Not down, he had not seen
Lush lanes of vernal peace, and green
Unebbing windless tides of trees; no wheeling gold
Upon the lamplit wall where is no speed
Save that which peaceful tongue ’twixt bed and supper wrought.
    Here still the blue, the headlands; here still he
Who did not waken and was not awaked.
The eagle sped its lonely course and tall;
Was gone. Yet still upon his lonely hill the lad
Winged on past changing headlands where was laked
The constant blue
    And saw the fleeing canyons of the sky
Tilt to banshee wire and slanted aileron,
And his own lonely shape on scudding walls
Where harp the ceaseless thunders of the sun.

XIX
    G REEN is the water, green
The grave voluptuous music of the sun;
The pale and boneless fingers of a queen
Upon his body stoop and run.
    Within these slow cathedralled corridors
Where ribs of sunlight drown
He joins in green caressing wars
With seamaids red and brown
    And chooses one to bed upon
And lapped and lulled is he
By dimdissolving music of the sun
Requiemed down through the sea.

XX
    H ERE he stands, while eternal evening falls
And it is like a dream between gray walls
Slowly