By dark severance the apparition head <br />Smiles from the air a capital on no <br />Column or a Platonic perhaps head <br />On a canvas sky depending from nothing; <br /> <br />Stirs up an old illusion of grandeur <br />By tickling the instinct of heads to be <br />Absolute and to try decapitation <br />And to play truant from the body bush; <br /> <br />But too happy and beautiful for those sorts <br />Of head (homekeeping heads are happiest) <br />Discovers maybe thirty unwidowed years <br />Of not dishonoring the faithful stem; <br /> <br />Is nameless and has authored for the evil <br />Historian headhunters neither book <br />Nor state and is therefore distinct from tart <br />Heads with crowns and guilty gallery heads; <br /> <br />Wherefore the extravagant device of art <br />Unhousing by abstraction this once head <br />Was capital irony by a loving hand <br />That knew the no treason of a head like this; <br /> <br />Makes repentance in an unlovely head <br />For having vinegarly traduced the flesh <br />Till, the hurt flesh recusing, the hard egg <br />Is shrunken to its own deathlike surface; <br /> <br />And an image thus. The body bears the head <br />(So hardly one they terribly are two) <br />Feeds and obeys and unto please what end? <br />Not to the glory of tyrant head but to <br /> <br />The estate of body. Beauty is of body. <br />The flesh contouring shallowly on a head <br />Is a rock-garden needing body's love <br />And best bodiness to colorify <br /> <br />The big blue birds sitting and sea-shell cats <br />And caves, and on the iron acropolis <br />To spread the hyacinthine hair and rear <br />The olive garden for the nightingales.<br /><br />John Crowe Ransom<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/painted-head/
