The air is sweetest that a thistle guards.
But the lean scholar, reading Buffon and Horace,
Shuts his brown book, marking the place with a flower
Picked from the fragrant riot below his terrace,
And the sea rings with doubloons and the blossoming words
Of no poet are cleanly about him in a loud shower.
Those feasts, the jubilant quince and bursting pear,
The Judas tree and page in the wind rinsed.
He watches the young laundress of the shore
With blueing and suds rear linen virginals
In sprays of gold, her cloths, white birds, careless;
She stands like any maiden loved by Zeus.
His murkiest deeds, night-thoughts that hammer him
Upon his bed, are charmed into the light,
As might on one day of each year at noon
All creatures of the midnight wake and fly
In a fine sport under the lavish sun
To greet once what they are least succored by:
His dark thoughts whirl until they fall unconscious,
And the warm noon stoops over them then, anxious,
Passionate ah, the ceremony of rape!
Rape, though of no flesh, nor of mind indeed,
But of the eye, in gauzes negligent,
That, scorched by the flowering nostrils, overstreams.
Then sudden ease: beyond the straits, the climb
Ecstatic of cloud-whites on porcelain, while
Supinely through high morning like a girl
Innocence glides, dipping a wrist in time,
On a white bull of cloud, a full white belle
Smiling, a bridal in the wastes of pearl.
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