Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud. I knew that horse play, knew it for a murderous thing. What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat And that alone; yet I, being driven half insane Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat In the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grain And after baked it slowly in an oven; but now I bring full flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander’s empire past, they slept so sound. Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep; I have loved you better than my soul for all my words, And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds. AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN I I walk through the long schoolroom questioning, A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way--the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty year old smiling public man. II I dream of a Ledæan body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy-- Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato’s parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell. III And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t’other there And wonder if she stood so at that age-- For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler’s heritage-- And had that colour upon cheek or hair And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child. IV Her present image floats in to the mind-- Did quattrocento finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mass of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledæan kind Had pretty plumage once--enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. V What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide, Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth? VI Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. VII