THE PEDIGREE

I bent in the deep of night

Over a pedigree the chronicler gave

As mine; and as I bent there, half-unrobed,

The uncurtained panes of my window-square let in the watery light

Of the moon in its old age:

And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed

Like a drifting dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave.

So, scanning my sire-sown tree,

And the hieroglyphs of this spouse tied to that,

With offspring mapped below in lineage,

Till the tangles troubled me,

The branches seemed to twist into a seared and cynic face

Which winked and tokened towards the window like a Mage

Enchanting me to gaze again thereat.

It was a mirror now,

And in it a long perspective I could trace

Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each

All with the kindred look,

Whose names had since been inked down in their place

On the recorder's book,

Generation and generation of my mien, and build, and brow.

And then did I divine

That every heave and coil and move I made

Within my brain, and in my mood and speech,

Was in the glass portrayed

As long forestalled by their so making it;

The first of them, the primest fuglemen of my line,

Being fogged in far antiqueness past surmise and reason's reach.