Solar Eclipse

Observe these blue solemnities of sky Offering for the academes of after-ages A mythologic welkin freaked with white! Listen : one tiny tinkling rivulet Accentuates the super-sultry stillness That drones on ripening landscapes which imply Serene Parnassus plagued with amorous goats. * * * * Far down the vale Apollo has pursued The noon-bedazzled nymph whose hunted heart Holds but the trampling panic whence it fled, And now the heavens are piled with darkening trouble And counter-march of clouds that troop intent Fire-crested into conflict. Daphne turns At the wood's edge in bronze and olive gloom: Sickness assails the sun whose blazing disc Dwindles : the Eden of those auburn slopes Lours in the tarnished copper of eclipse. Yet virgin in her god-impelled approach To Graeco-Roman ravishment, she waits While the unsated python slides to crush Her lust-eluding fleetness. Envious Jove Rumbles Olympus. All the classic world Leans breathless toward the legend she creates. From thunderous vapour smites the immortal beam . . . Then, crowned with fangs of foliage, flames the god. * * * * ' Apollo ! ' ... Up the autumn valley echoes A hollow shout from nowhere. Daphne's limbs Lapse into laureldom : green-shadowed flesh Writhes aborescent; glamour obscures her gaze With blind and bossed distortion. She escapes.