I walked to observe, not to feel, Not to fancy, if simple of eye One may be among images reaped For a shift of the glance, as grain: Profitless froth you espy Ashore after billows have leaped. I fled nothing, nothing pursued: The changeful visible face Of our Mother I sought for my food; Crumbs by the way to sustain. Her sentence I knew past grace. Myself I had lost of us twain, Once bound in mirroring thought. She had flung me to dust in her wake; And I, as your convict drags His chain, by the scourge untaught, Bore life for a goad, without aim. I champed the sensations that make Of a ruffled philosophy rags. For them was no meaning too blunt, Nor aspect too cutting of steel. This Earth of the beautiful breasts, Shining up in all colours aflame, To them had visage of hags: A Mother of aches and jests: Soulless, heading a hunt Aimless except for the meal. Hope, with the star on her front; Fear, with an eye in the heel; Our links to a Mother of grace; They were dead on the nerve, and dead For the nature divided in three; Gone out of heart, out of brain, Out of soul: I had in their place The calm of an empty room. We were joined but by that thin thread, My disciplined habit to see. And those conjure images, those, The puppets of loss or gain; Not he who is bare to his doom; For whom never semblance plays To bewitch, overcloud, illume. The dusty mote-images rose; Sheer film of the surface awag: They sank as they rose; their pain Declaring them mine of old days. Now gazed I where, sole upon gloom, As flower-bush in sun-specked crag, Up the spine of the double combe With yew-boughs heavily cloaked, A young apparition shone: Known, yet wonderful, white Surpassingly; doubtfully known, For it struck as the birth of Light: Even Day from the dark unyoked. It waved like a pilgrim flag O’er processional penitents flown When of old they broke rounding yon spine: O the pure wild-cherry in bloom!