I CLOSED my hands upon a moth
And when I drew my palms apart,
Instead of dusty, broken wings,
I found a bleeding human heart.
I crushed my foot upon a worm
That had my garden for its goal,
But when I drew my foot aside
I found a dying human soul.
Darkness comes out of the earth
And swallows dip into the pallor of the west;
From the hay comes the clamour of children's
mirth;
Wanes the old palimpsest.
The night-stock oozes scent,
And a moon-blue moth goes flittering by:
All that the worldly day has meant
Wastes like a lie.
The children have forsaken their play;
A single star in a veil of light
Glimmers: litter of day
Is gone from sight.
A GOLDWING moth is between the scissors and the ink
bottle on the desk.
Last night it flew hundreds of circles around a glass bulb
and a flame wire.
The wings are a soft gold; it is the gold of illuminated
initials in manuscripts of the medieval monks.
In the sky there is a moon and stars.
And in my garden there are yellow moths
Fluttering about a white azalea bush.
Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . .
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?
TRANSLATED BY MEDWIN AND CORRECTED BY SHELLEY.
Hast thou not seen, officious with delight,
Move through the illumined air about the flower
The Bee, that fears to drink its purple light,
Lest danger lurk within that Rose's bower?
Hast thou not marked the moth's enamoured flight
About the Taper's flame at evening hour;
'Till kindle in that monumental fire
His sunflower wings their own funereal pyre?
My heart, its wishes trembling to unfold.
Thus round the Rose and Taper hovering came,
'And Passion's slave, Distrust, in ashes cold.
Smothered awhile, but could not quench the flame,'--
Till Love, that grows by disappointment bold,
And Opportunity, had conquered Shame;
And like the Bee and Moth, in act to close,