Beauty love as finishing fate And to Love beauty as true colour of it. Let he but friend be who the soul finds fair, But let none love outside the body’s thought, So the seen couple’s togetherness shall bear Truth to the beauty each in the other sought. I could but love thee out of mockery Of love and thee and mine own ugliness; Therefore thy beauty I sing and wish not thee, Thanking the Gods I long not out of place, Lest, like a slave that for kings’ robes doth long, Obtained, shall with mere wearing do them wrong. 

 

XX.

 When in the widening circle of rebirth To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come, And try again the unremembered earth With the old sadness for the immortal home, Shall I revisit these same differing fields And cull the old new flowers with the same sense, That some small breath of foiled remembrance yields, Of more age than my days in this pretence? Shall I again regret strange faces lost Of which the present memory is forgot And but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossed Out of the closed sea and black night of Thought? Were thy face one, what sweetness will’t not be, Though by blind feeling, to remember thee! 

 

XXI.

 Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing. Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes, Still suggests form as aught whose proper being Mere finding touch with erring darkness drapes. Yet whence, except from guessed sight, does touch teach That touch is but a close and empty sense? How does mere touch, self-uncontented, reach For some truer sense’s whole intelligence? The thing once touched, if touch be now omitted, Stands yet in memory real and outward known, So the untouching memory of touch is fitted With sense of a sense whereby far things are shown So, by touch of untouching, wrongly aright, Touch’ thought of seeing sees not things but Sight. 

 

XXII.

 My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man, Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older, Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan, Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder. Whate’er its sense may mean, its age is twin To that of priesthoods whose feet stood near God, When knowledge was so great that ’twas a sin And man’s mere soul too man for its abode. But when I ask what means that pageant I And would look at it suddenly, I lose The sense I had of seeing it, nor can try Again to look, nor hath my memory a use That seems recalling, save that it recalls An emptiness of having seen 

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