Page:Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.djvu/25

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"THE AGE DEMANDED"

Vide Poem II. Page 10

OR this agility chance found

Him of all men, unfit
As the red-beaked steeds of
The Cytheræan for a chain-bit.

The glow of porcelain
Brought no reforming sense
To his perception
Of the social inconsequence.

Thus, if her colour
Came against his gaze,
Tempered as if
It were through a perfect glaze

He made no immediate application
Of this to relation of the state
To the individual, the month was more temperate
Because this beauty had been

.....

The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand

Burst in upon the porcelain revery:
Impetuous troubling

Of his imagery.

.....

Mildness, amid the neo-Neitzschean clatter,
His sense of graduations,
Quite out of place amid
Resistance to current exacerbations

Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity
Gradually led him to the isolation
Which these presents place
Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.