ELEGY II

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In the confused magnificence of love
is no community, but unsharing crowds
of shuttered faces where no secrets move;
but a perpetual early-closing day.
The tender lust that sanctifies our bloods,
that flowered by companionship, the way
of the moth's mind, they neither feel nor speak,
haunted with flames: our world's a spirit-walk.

Behind the dreaming shutters of our faces
the spider fingers thoughts, and we dissect
with sharp artistic hands our gains and losses;
build the mosaic of a filtered world.
We hang a blinding arras upon the fact,
for wild wild unpardonably wild
the roaring of the outer enmity.
Yet we, being islanded, will draw down that sea.

Never believe us; poets tell you lies:
the burglar breaks the window, and the door
blows inwards, and the pictures tatter loose.
The snarler with hooked fingers, or the man
with nooses, throw a shadow on the floor.
Sooner or later we shall weep again.
There is no refuge from the teeming road
and the four walkers waiting to be God.

World was not built for dreams, my dear; the dreamer
cores his unsympathy to a navel of gold;
rides home at evening swathed about with clamour,
he in his inward starlight never seeing
commercial colours, or the nervous mould
that hangs their lightning round him.  And so being 
rapt from humanity, wake not till their feet
press down his bones to raise up Regent Street.

So our delight will never be alone,
or straight and safe as the lark's tower of air;
familiar things will break it, strange look on
with the fierce laugh of lynchers; and the sea
speak our end in mountains to the shore.
Oh if that future tears us, it will be
but bridal violence.  For he loves you still
who leans and weeps upon the window-sill.
					     CAIRO.