I think it must have been along the Nile That first these speckled membranes burst the pod, Before the boy-flat breasts of some half-cat Half-man and beryl-eyed Egyptian god. Or first they grew about forgotten tombs The apes inherit in hot jungles where Like xanthic suns through aquid shade of leaves A spotted leopard's dilate pupils stare. These were the mottled blossoms of Gomorrah, Wreathed on beast-gods by priestly Sodomites, By Baal fires when the talking timbrel's sound Fell from Astarte's groves on full moon nights. They suck a yellow venom from the sun And mid their reedy stocks there comes and goes The forked, black lightning of a serpent's tongue That hisses as his slippery body flows. Such lilies bloom beside the gates of hell And poison honey festers in their pods, Olid as tales of lust told long ago About the wanton mother of the gods. And I would plant them by the lichened tomb Of that veiled queen who died of leprosy With two red princes smothered in her womb; Their roots would feed on her in secrecy. THREE LANDSCAPE MOODS. The First: Youth. Youth is a vale afire with hollyhocks, Robbed by those greedy publicans the bees, Where cuckoos call like fairy story clocks And blue-jays holla in the apple trees. No thunderheads come up with black despair To dim its arching orchard's leafy sheen, But clouds like ivory towers pile in air And gothic woods stand, cloistered, cool and green. It is a glade where earliest flowers grow, Along the melting snowbanks in the spring, The waxen-stemmed anemones first show, And Madame Woodthrush preens her dainty wing. White hyacinths like masts with flower spars Stand in the woods and dot each bosky lawn, Like distant sails or clusters of pale stars Against an emerald sky at early dawn. Cleft in life's hills, Youth is a sheltered swale Where for a while we lie in indolence And watch time's waterfall thin as a veil That falls and hangs and smokes in long suspense, And there a fountain spouts of purest joy That feeds the fall, birds whistle on its brim, Often I lay beside it when a boy And saw the future mirrored vague and dim-- Heaven was there a strangely clouded page, Two rivers on the plains met like a "Y," And blue as ghosts the mountains of old age Rolled down the western sky. The Second: High Tide o' Life. High Tide o' Life's a city by the sea, By tide rips where the flood comes shouting in, On straits that bring up ships with spicèd freights And sails as scarlet as a woman's sin. A mart where merchants chaffer on the docks For pearls and feather work and jewel'd shoon, And hurry off to feast when all the clocks Strike anvil-tongued a thousand-noted noon.