| |
| DEEP 1 in the shady sadness of a vale | |
| Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, | |
| Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, | |
| Sat grey-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone, | |
| Still as the silence round about his lair; | 5 |
| Forest on forest hung about his head | |
| Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, | |
| Not so much life as on a summer’s day | |
| Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, | |
| But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. | 10 |
| A stream went voiceless by, still deaden’d more | |
| By reason of his fallen divinity | |
| Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds | |
| Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips … | |
| |
| It seem’d no force could wake him from his place; | 15 |
| But there came one, who with a kindred hand | |
| Touch’d his wide shoulders, after bending low | |
| With reverence, though to one who knew it not. | |
| She was a Goddess of the infant world; | |
| By her in stature the tall Amazon | 20 |
| Had stood a pigmy’s height: she would have ta’en | |
| Achilles by the hair and bent his neck; | |
| Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel. | |
| Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx, | |
| Pedestal’d haply in a palace-court, | 25 |
| When sages look’d to Egypt for their lore. | |
| But oh! how unlike marble was that face: | |
| How beautiful, if sorrow had not made | |
| Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self. | |
| There was a listening fear in her regard, | 30 |
| As if calamity had but begun; | |
| As if the vanward clouds of evil days | |
| Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear | |
| Was with its stored thunder labouring up … | |
