Page:In Xanadu.djvu/10

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

III

COURT OF THE AGES

So fancy caught
My sleeve and brought
Me to a court embowered in orange trees.
Eve was allured by such apples as these,
And they hung in the groves of the Hesperides,
And rapture and dolor they wrought.
Sea-born columns round them loom—
As when along the shore the spume,
Scudding ahead of the wave, escapes,
And, yellow and empty, in idle shapes
Quivers, and stays where it is blown—
So, fretted into airy grace,
The foamy shafts of mellow stone
Stand round about the place
Guarding azure porticoes
And shadowed coigns of pictured space;
And like the drifts
Of tumbled cliffs
The sculptured tower lightly lifts
On high,
Breaking to tender minarets
Against the sky.

And there in the midst the round earth glows,
Lazily swimming,
Flushing, dimming,
Hazily swaddled in vapor of rose.
It is the pristine world afloat
In mist primeval, fog remote,
And the waters beneath that glow and fade
Are the sea before the land was made.