| Dry timber under that rich foliage, |
| At wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood, |
| Too old for a man’s love
I stood in rage |
| Imagining men. Imagining that I could |
| A greater with a lesser pang assuage |
| Or but to
find if withered vein ran blood, |
| I tore my body that its wine might cover |
| Whatever could recall the lip
of lover. |
|
|
|
|
| And after that I held my fingers up, |
| Stared at the wine-dark nail, or dark that ran |
| Down every
withered finger from the top; |
| But the dark changed to red, and torches shone, |
| And deafening music
shook the leaves; a troop |
| Shouldered a litter with a wounded man, |
| Or smote upon the string and to the
sound |
| Sang of the beast that gave the fatal wound. |
|
|
|
|
| All stately women moving to a song |
| With loosened
hair or foreheads grief-distraught, |
| It seemed a Quattrocento painter’s throng, |
| A thoughtless image of
Mantegna’s thought— |
| Why should they think that are for ever young? |
| Till suddenly in grief’s contagion
caught, |
| I stared upon his blood-bedabbled breast |
| And sang my malediction with the rest. |
|
|
|
|
| That thing all
blood and mire, that beast-torn wreck, |
| Half turned and fixed a glazing eye on mine, |
| And, though love’s
bitter-sweet had all come back, |
| Those bodies from a picture or a coin |
| Nor saw my body fall nor heard
it shriek, |
| Nor knew, drunken with singing as with wine, |
| That they had brought no fabulous symbol there |
| But my heart’s victim and its torturer. |
