From Peeping Tom
How vainly open eyes amaze
Themselves with the synoptic gaze!
And cloud the mediant air between
The image and the object seen,
Whose public face may never ask
The one behind it to unmask.
Better to see, I made my home
This dark eye, a transparent dome.
To pierce with pools of mental light
The pudency that shades the night,
I turn my stare on hidden suns,
Forbidden constellations;
Each planet spinning in her niche;
And bright elliptic visions which
No intervening prospect mars:
The winking habits of the stars.
Thus I, crazy astronomer,
Whose heavens are this earth confer
Among my lenses with the few
Who sought for the forbidden view:
Sweet Insight’s Martyrs! each displays
The Keyhole, emblem of his praise,
Unlocked by only those who try
The fitting key, the peering eye.
Where Privacy was put to rout
Actaeon peeped true beauty out;
Lot’s wife risked all that she might know
What salt had lost its savor so;
Tom’s blind eyes clasped, without remorse,
Chaste whiteness straddled on a horse,
And Orpheus turned about to see
His noumenal Eurydice.
Ah, what a life with them I led!
Bright data danced inside my head;
By brambles, where I used to lie,
Endangering the naked eye,
I sped my floating sight to drift
Round Sandra standing in her shift,
To seize a patch of pink and white
Undifferentiated light:
My mother’s opera-glass laid bare
The sensibilia lurking there,
Sharp images that should have kept
Secret the Things in which they slept;
Like crystal thoughts that hidden dwell
Within the gem’s deceptive shell,
Or mild affections, unbetrayed
By the dark face of a dark shade.
Such innocency as was mine
When, clinging to my neighbor’s vine,
I learned that all but blinding lies
Are interdicted from the eyes,
Infused our former State, where turned
Two heavenly bodies; as each burned
The other took his light therefrom:
A perfect Planetarium!
The Beautiful, the virtuous Mean
Were then permitted to be seen
Before false opened eyes effaced
Those bright inscriptions with distaste;
And letters which enclosed the True
By clothes were folded out of view,
Whose blind impress upon the seal
Made the apparent the unreal.
I, in my glassy Paradise,
With fading sight anatomize
The figures of the world, and trope
As rod and staff, my telescope,
Awaiting the descent of night
When I shall read the darkened light
Behind day’s unperceiving pall;
While seeing nothing, knowing all.
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