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