Guillaume de Lorris Belated

Wisdom set apart from all desire,

A hoary Nestor with youth's own glad eyes,

Him met I at the style, and all benign

He greeted me an equal and I knew,

By this his lack of pomp, he was himself.

Slow-Smiling is companion unto him,

And Mellow-Laughter serves, his trencherman.

And I a thousand beauties there beheld.

And he and they made merry endlessly.

And love was rayed between them as a mist,

And yet so fine and delicate a haze

It did impede the eyes no whit,

Unless it were to make the halo round each one

Appear more myriad-jewelled marvellous,

Than any pearled and ruby diadem the courts o’ earth ha’ known.

Slender as mist-wrought maids and hamadryads

Did meseem these shapes that ministered,

These formed harmonies with lake-deep eyes,

And first the cities of north Italy

I did behold,

Each as a woman wonder-fair,

And svelte Verona first I met at eve;

And in the dark we kissed and then the way

Bore us somewhile apart.

And yet my heart keeps tryst with her,

So every year our thoughts are interwove

As fingers were, such times as eyes see much, and tell.

And she that loved the master years agone,

That bears his signet in her “Signor Square,”

“Che lo glorifico. "

She spread her arms,

And in that deep embrace

All thoughts of woe were perished

And of pain and weariness and all the wrack

Of light-contending thoughts and battled-gleams,

( That our intelligence doth gain by strife against itself )

Of things we have not yet the earned right to clearly see.

And all, yea all that dust doth symbolize

Was there forgot, and my enfranchised soul

Grew as the liquid elements, and was infused

With joy that is not light, nor might nor harmony,

And yet hath part and quality of all these three,

Whereto is added calm past earthly peace.

Thus with Verona's spirit, and all time

Swept on beyond my ken, and as the sea

Hath in no wise a form within itself,

Cioe, as liquid hath no form save where it bounden is

By some enshrouding chalice of hard things —

As wine its graven goblet, and the sea

Its wave-hewn basalt for a bordering,

So had my thought and now my thought's remembrance

No “information” of whatso there passed

For this long space the dream-king's horny gate.

And when that age was done and the transfusion

Of all my self through her and she through me,

I did perceive that she enthroned two things:

Verona, and a maid I knew on earth;

And dulled some while from dream, and then become

That lower thing, deductive intellect, I saw

How all things are but symbols of all things,

And each of many, do we know

But the equation governing.

And in my rapture at this vision's scope

I saw no end or bourn to what things mean,

So praised Pythagoras and once more raised

By this said rapture to the house of Dream,

Beheld Fenice as a lotus-flower

Drift through the purple of the wedded sea

And grow a wraith and then a dark-eyed she,

And knew her name was “All-forgetfulness,”

And hailed her: “Princess of the Opiates,”

And guessed her evil and her good thereby.

And then a maid of nine “Pavia” hight,

Passed with a laugh that was all mystery,

And when I turned to her

She reached me one clear chalice of white wine,

Pressed from the recent grapes that yet were hung

Adown her shoulders, and were bound

Right cunningly about her elfish brows;

So hale a draught, the life of every grape

Lurked without ferment in the amber cloud.

And memory, this wine was, of all good.

And more I might have seen: Firenza, Goito,

Or that proudest gate, Ligurian Genoa,

Cornelia of Colombo of far sight,

That, man and seer in one, had well been twain,

And each a glory to his hills and sea;

And past her a great band

Bright garlanded or rich with purple skeins,

And crimson mantles and queynt fineries

That tarnished held but so the more

Of dim allurement in their half-shown folds:

So swept my vision o'er their filmy ranks,

Then rose some opaque cloud,

Whose name I have not yet discerned,

And music as I heard it one clear night

Within our earthly night's own mirroring,

Cioe,— San Pietro by Adige,

Where altar candles blazed out as dim stars,

And all the gloom was soft, and shadowy forms

Made and sang God, within the far-off choir.

And in a clear space high behind

Them and the tabernacle of that place,

Two tapers shew the master of the keys

As some white power pouring forth itself.

And all the church rang low and murmured

Thus in my dream of forms the music swayed.

And I was lost in it and only woke

When something like a mass bell rang, and then

That white-foot wind, pale Dawn's annunciatrice.

Me bore to earth again, but some strange peace

I had not known so well before this swevyn

Clung round my head and made me hate earth less.