Chapter LI: The Soul of Age

I have seen delicate aged women wrought Most tenderly by Time, their passionate past By the wise vigils of forgiving thought Amerced of pain, mere beauty at the last. So may my soul be chaste, serene, enriched Like an Etruscan mirror one has found In kind oblivions, graciously bewitched With precious patinas, a various round Of milky opal, or turkis, or emerald, Glistered with rubies faint and smoky pearls, Where swirls of incised pattern have enthralled Figures of sweet archaic gods and girls, And I shall say: "Thou art a curious toy, O soul that mirrored Love and Wrath and Joy!"

LI I

HYPNEROTOMACHIA

Ah! Pride and Wrath and Mirth and Pain and Pity, Some amethystine day at last will be, When your bright guard and Phantasy's hill-city Shall be like wonders on a tapestry; And we shall touch between tired orisons The symbolism of those freaked crowns and wings,-- Then gaze across the falling Avalons, The resignations of autumnal things, And see among the pointed cypresses The one god left, the smiling perverse god, The Love that will not leave the loverless, Contending with the Stranger of the Rod,-- Until these twain become as one, and all The Soul and Sense be starrily vesperal.