I would immortalize these nymphs; so bright Their sunlit colouring, so airy light, It floats like drowsy down. Loved I a dream? My doubts, born of oblivious darkness, seem A subtle tracery of branches grown The tree’s true self--proving that I have known, Thinking it love, the blushing of a rose. But think. These nymphs, their loveliness ... suppose They bodied forth your senses’ fabulous thirst? Illusion! which the blue eyes of the first, As cold and chaste as is the weeping spring, Beget: the other, sighing, passioning, Is she the wind, warm in your fleece at noon? No; through this quiet, when a weary swoon Crushes and chokes the latest faint essay Of morning, cool against the encroaching day, There is no murmuring water, save the gush Of my clear fluted notes; and in the hush Blows never a wind, save that which through my reed Puffs out before the rain of notes can speed Upon the air, with that calm breath of art That mounts the unwrinkled zenith visibly, Where inspiration seeks its native sky. You fringes of a calm Sicilian lake, The sun’s own mirror which I love to take, Silent beneath your starry flowers, tell _How here I cut the hollow rushes, well_ _Tamed by my skill, when on the glaucous gold_ _Of distant lawns about their fountain cold_ _A living whiteness stirs like a lazy wave;_ _And at the first slow notes my panpipes gave_ _These flocking swans, these naiads, rather, fly_ _Or dive_. Noon burns inert and tawny dry, Nor marks how clean that Hymen slipped away From me who seek in song the real A. Wake, then, to the first ardour and the sight, O lonely faun, of the old fierce white light, With, lilies, one of you for innocence. Other than their lips’ delicate pretence, The light caress that quiets treacherous lovers, My breast, I know not how to tell, discovers The bitten print of some immortal’s kiss. But hush! a mystery so great as this I dare not tell, save to my double reed, Which, sharer of my every joy and need, Dreams down its cadenced monologues that we Falsely confuse the beauties that we see With the bright palpable shapes our song creates: My flute, as loud as passion modulates, Purges the common dream of flank and breast, Seen through closed eyes and inwardly caressed, Of every empty and monotonous line.