The human contours are so easily lost. Only close your eyes and you seem a forest Of dense vegetation, and the lurking beast That in the night springs from the cover Tears with tiger's mouth your living creatures, A thousand innocent victims without name that suffer. Science applies its insect-lenses to the form divine As up the red river (all life comes from the sea) Swim strange monsters, amoeboid erythrean spawn. Rock-face of bone, alluvium of cartilage Remote from man as the surface of the moon Are vast and unexplored interior desert ranges, And autonomous cells Grow like unreaped fields of waving corn. Air filters through the lungs' fine branches as through trees. Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic, Venus the white queen, the universal matrix, Down to molecular hexagons and carbon-chains, And the male nerve-impulse, monition of reality, Conveys the charge, dynamic of non-entity That sparks across the void @3ex nihilo@1. At the extreme of consciousness, prayer Fixes hands and feet immobile to a chair, Transmutes all heaven and earth into a globe of air, And soul streams away out of the top of the head Like flame in a lamp-glass carried in the draught Of the celestial fire kindled in the solar plexus. Oh man, oh Garden of Eden, there is nothing But the will of love to uphold your seeming world, To trace in chaos the contours of your beloved form! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...AN ANCIENT PROVERB by WILLIAM BLAKE THE CLOD AND THE PEBBLE, FR. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE AULD ROBIN GRAY by ANNE LINDSAY THE CONGO by NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY THE TUFT OF KELP by HERMAN MELVILLE THE HOUSE OF LIFE: 4. LOVESIGHT by DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI TO A PORTRAIT by ARTHUR WILLIAM SYMONS |