The Winged Beetle

ROSA COELI 7 Your hair was like a forest of tall pines In winter ; black strange dwarfs with crooked spines And elfin eyes, and bleating mouths that worked All manner of grimace and bleak derision Bore them away ; hollow-eyed ghosts that lurked About the sea made thereof masts ; they fitted Tall ships and goodly, furrowing the deep To harvest merchandise ; strong and keen-witted The mariners ; oho ! the breezes leap Like lovers on them ; lo ! they fared forth To South, East, West and North, Iceland, the Indies, Sicily, and Spain. . . . Lo ! men have heard of all these ships not one, not one for ever more again. VII Seeing your naked body in the bed Against the jetty silk, I thought you lay Just as the Milky Way Lies in the unkenned hollows of the sky. One swarthy ray of red Leapt from your hither eye, And straight my dream began To map that heaven—your eye, Aldeboran ! I launched the magic boat, and early found The Pirate’s cave and the Enchaunted Ground ; The cedared Lebanon, The Wizard’s Grot, the well of spice, The Hanging Gardens of great Babylon :— All these then did I visit in a trice,