To Mary

(On her objecting to the following poem, upon the score of its containing no human interest)

I.

OW, my dear Mary, are you criticbitten,

H

(For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review,

That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true! What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten,

May it not leap and play as grown cats do, Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time, Content thee with a visionary rhyme.

II.

What hand would crush the silken-wingèd fly, The youngest of inconstant April's minions,

Because it cannot climb the purest sky,

Where the swan sings, amid the sun's

dominions?

Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to

die,

When day shall hide within her twilight pinions,

The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile,
Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

III.

To thy fair feet a wingèd Vision came,

Whose date should have been longer than a

day,

And o'er thy head did beat its wings for

fame,

And in thy sight its fading plumes display;

The watery bow burned in the evening flame, But the shower fell, the swift sun went his

And that is dead. Oh, let me not believe

That anything of mine is fit to live!

IV.

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years Considering and retouching Peter Bell; Watering his laurels with the killing tears

Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres

Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well

May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil The overbusy gardener's blundering toil.

V.

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature
As Ruth and Lucy, whom his graceful praise
Clothes for our grandsons- but she matches
Peter,

Though he took nineteen years, and she three days

In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre She wears; he, proud as dandy with his

stays,

Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress
Like King Lear's "looped and windowed rag-

gedness."

VI.

If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow:

A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at; In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello.

If

you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate

Can shrive you of that sin,
of that sin, — if sin there be
In love, when it becomes idolatry.

The Witch of Atlas

I.

EFORE those cruel Twins, whom

at one birth

Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,

Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth All those bright natures which adorned its prime,

And left us nothing to believe in, worth

The pains of putting into learnèd rhyme, A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.

II.

Her mother was one of the Atlantides:

The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden