The Pure Good of Theory

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time

That batters against the mind, silent and proud,

The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse

Without a rider on a road at night.

The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street.

The reader by the window has finished his book

And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:

A retardation of its battering,

A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth . . . If we propose

A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,

And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may

Mature: A capable being may replace

Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,

The inimical music, the enchantered space

In which the enchanted preludes have their place.