A Bronze Head
HERE
at
right
of
the
entrance
this
bronze
head,
Human,
superhuman,
a
bird's
round
eye,
Everything
else
withered
and
mummy-dead.
What
great
tomb-haunter
sweeps
the
distant
sky
(Something
may
linger
there
though
all
else
die)
And
finds
there
nothing
to
make
its
terror
less
Hysterica
passio
of
its
own
emptiness?
No
dark
tomb-haunter
once;
her
form
all
full
As
though
with
magnanimity
of
light,
Yet
a
most
gentle
woman;
who
can
tell
Which
of
her
forms
has
shown
her
substance
right?
Or
maybe
substance
can
be
composite,
profound
McTaggart
thought
so,
and
in
a
breath
A
mouthful
held
the
extreme
of
life
and
death.
But
even
at
the
starting-post,
all
sleek
and
new,
I
saw
the
wildness
in
her
and
I
thought
A
vision
of
terror
that
it
must
live
through
Had
shattered
her
soul.
Propinquity
had
brought
Imagination
to
that
pitch
where
it
casts
out
All
that
is
not
itself:
I
had
grown
wild
And
wandered
murmuring
everywhere,
"My
child,
my
child!
'
Or
else
I
thought
her
supernatural;
As
though
a
sterner
eye
looked
through
her
eye
On
this
foul
world
in
its
decline
and
fall;
On
gangling
stocks
grown
great,
great
stocks
run
dry,
Ancestral
pearls
all
pitched
into
a
sty,
Heroic
reverie
mocked
by
clown
and
knave,
And
wondered
what
was
left
for
massacre
to
save.
