One alone sings not. Tiredly She sees the white blooms crushed, and smells The heavy scent. They chatter: "See! White Zira thinks of nothing else But the morn's jollity -- "Then Haroun takes her!" But she dreams, Unhearing, of a certain field Of poppies, cut by many streams, Like lines across a round Turk shield, Where now the hot sun gleams. The field whereon they walked that day, And splendor filled her body up, And his; and then the trampled clay, And slow smoke climbing the sky's cup From where the village lay. And after -- much ache of the wrists, Where the cords irked her -- till she came, The price of many amethysts, Hither. And now the ultimate shame Blew trumpet in the lists. And so she trod the poppies there, Remembering other poppies, too, And did not seem to see or care. Without, the first gray drops of dew Sweetened the trembling air. She trod the poppies. Hours passed Until she slept at length -- and Time Dragged his slow sickle. When at last She woke, the moon shone, bright as rime, And night's tide rolled on fast. She moaned once, knowing everything; Then, bitterer than death, she found The soft handmaidens, in a ring, Come to anoint her, all around, That she might please the king. Opium -- and the odor dies away, Leaving the air yet heavy -- cassia -- myrrh -- Bitter and splendid. See, the poisons come, Trooping in squat green vials, blazoned red With grinning skulls: strychnine, a pallid dust Of tiny grains, like bones ground fine; and next The muddy green of arsenic, all livid, Likest the face of one long dead -- they creep Along the dusty shelf like deadly beetles, Whose fangs are carved with runnels, that the blood May run down easily to the blind mouth That snaps and gapes; and high above them there, My master's pride, a cobwebbed, yellow pot Of honey from Mount Hybla. Do the bees Still moan among the low sweet purple clover, Endlessly many? Still in deep-hushed woods, When the incredible silver of the moon Comes like a living wind through sleep-bowed branches, Still steal dark shapes from the enchanted glens, Which yet are purple with high dreams, and still Fronting that quiet and eternal shield Which is much more than Peace, does there still stand One sharp black shadow -- and the short, smooth horns Are clear against that disk? O great Diana! I, I have praised thee, yet I do not know What moves my mind so strangely, save that once I lay all night upon a thymy hill, And watched the slow clouds pass like heaped-up foam Across blue marble, till at last no speck