WHEN to those Venusbergs, thy breasts,

A few poisoned arrows, a cask of pearls,And five thousand pounds in the colonial funds,Now sails the street in a brick villa, ‘Laburnum Villa’,In whose blank windows the harbour hangsLike a fog against the glass,Golden and smoky, or stoned with a white glitter,And boats go by, suspended in the pane,Blue Funnel, Red Funnel, Messageries Maritimes,Lugged…

Throws up, like death itself concealed,A fang of rosy flint,A flake of stone, by fingers hewedWhose buried bones are gone,All gone, with fingers, hunters, food,But still the knife lives on.And well I know, when bones are nought,The blade of stone survives—I, too, from clods of aching thought,Have turned up sharper knives.

As if this nitrous flange of stoneWept suddenly with such a cry;As if the rock found lips to sigh,The riven earth a mouth to moan;But we that hear them, stumbling by,Confuse their torments with our own.Over the huge abraded rind,Crow-countries graped with dung, we go,Past gullies that no longer flowAnd wells that nobody can find,Lashed…

Run tentacles through flagstone cracks,Or claw beyond, where meditateWet poplars on a pitchy lawn.Some seignior of colonial fameHas planted here a stone-cut faunWhose flute juts like a frozen flame.O lonely faun, what songs are theseFor skies where no Immortals hide?Why finger in this dour abodeThose Pan-pipes girdled at your side?Your Gods, and Hellas too, have…

Let them embalm your beauty whoso canIn boastful odes, I’m a more honest man.Lovers’ abodes with poets’ words are paved,But prudent girls would get those vows engraved,For brass than paper being something strongerMay last, it’s more than like, a fortnight longer.Where’s the fine music that the fossil menOf lost Lemuria brandished on a pen?All tossed…

Flakes of wild milk gone blowing,Snowing on cloudy stalks.The Snowdrop Girl goes picking flowers of snow,Blossoms of darkness bubbling into dreams,In a strange country, by the shadowy streamsWhere the cruel petals of the Coke-tree grow.From the smoke and the fume of the backyard room,Where poverty sits and gloats,On runaway feet from a dirty streetTo a…