The yellow marble smooth as water Builds me a Golden House; and there The marble gods sleep in their strength And the white Parian girls are fair. Roses and waxen oleanders, Green grape bunches and the flushed peach,— All beautiful things I taste, touch, see, Knowing, loving, becoming each. The ship went down, my mother swam: I wedded and myself was wed; Old Claudius died of emperor-bane: Old Seneca too slowly bled. The wild beast and the victim both, The ravisher and the wincing bride; King of the world and a slave’s slave, Terror-haunted, deified— An artist, O sweet Sporus, an artist, All these I am and needs must be. Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you. And you have heard my symphony Of wailing voices and clashed brass, With long shrill flutings that suspend Pain o’er a muttering gulf of terrors, And piercing breathless joys that end In agony—could I have made My song of Furies were the bane Still sap within the hemlock stalk, The red swords virgin bright again? Or take a child’s love that is all Worship, all tenderness and trust, A dawn-web, dewy and fragile—take And with the violence of lust Tear and defile it. You shall hear The breaking dumbness and the thin Harsh crying that is the very music Of shame and the remorse of sin. Christ died; the artist lives for all; Loves, and his naked marbles stand Pure as a column on the sky, Whose lips, whose breast and thighs demand Not our humiliation, not The shuddering of an after shame; And of his agonies men know Only the beauty born of them. Christ died, but living Nero turns Your mute remorse to song; he gives To idiot fate eyes like a lover’s, And while his music plays, God lives. Romantic and noble sentiments! I protest, they do me credit. And then there are the fragments about Tiberius; Tiberius, need I add, the representative in my symbolic scheme of love. Here is one. “In the gardens at Capri.” (All my scenes are laid in gardens, I notice, at night, under the moon. Perhaps the fact is significant. Who knows?)