Dry timber under that rich foliage, <br />At wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood, <br />Too old for a man's love I stood in rage <br />Imagining men. Imagining that I could <br />A greater with a lesser pang assuage <br />Or but to find if withered vein ran blood, <br />I tore my body that its wine might cover <br />Whatever could rccall the lip of lover. <br /> <br />And after that I held my fingers up, <br />Stared at the wine-dark nail, or dark that ran <br />Down every withered finger from the top; <br />But the dark changed to red, and torches shone, <br />And deafening music shook the leaves; a troop <br />Shouldered a litter with a wounded man, <br />Or smote upon the string and to the sound <br />Sang of the beast that gave the fatal wound. <br /> <br />All stately women moving to a song <br />With loosened hair or foreheads grief-distraught, <br />It seemed a Quattrocento painter's throng, <br />A thoughtless image of Mantegna's thought -- <br />Why should they think that are for ever young? <br />Till suddenly in grief's contagion caught, <br />I stared upon his blood-bedabbled breast <br />And sang my malediction with the rest. <br /> <br />That thing all blood and mire, that beast-torn wreck, <br />Half turned and fixed a glazing eye on mine, <br />And, though love's bitter-sweet had all come back, <br />Those bodies from a picture or a coin <br />Nor saw my body fall nor heard it shriek, <br />Nor knew, drunken with singing as with wine, <br />That they had brought no fabulous symbol there <br />But my heart's victim and its torturer.<br /><br />William Butler Yeats<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/her-vision-in-the-wood/
