the gods!, but spare
This boy and his white body and golden hair.
Maybe thy newer Ganymede thou meanst
That he should be, and out of jealous care
From Hadrian's arms to thine his beauty steal'st.

He was a kitten playing with lust, playing
With his own and with Hadrian's, sometimes one
And sometimes two, now splitting, now one grown,
Now leaving lust, now lust's high lusts delaying,
Now eyeing lust not wide, but from askance
Jumping round on lust's half-unexpectance;
Then softly gripping, then with fury holding,
Now playfully playing, now seriously, now lying
By the side of lust looking at it, now spying
Which way to take lust in his lust's withholding.

Thus did the hours slide from their tangled hands
And from their mixed limbs the moments slip.
Now were his arms dead leaves, now iron bands,
Now were his lips cups, now the things that sip,
Now were his eyes too closed, and now too open,
Now were his ways such as none thought might happen,
Now were his arts a feather and now a whip.

That love they lived as a religion
Offered to gods that do to presence bend.
Sometimes he was adorned and made to don
Half-costumes, now a posing nudity
That imitates some god's eternity
Of body statue-known to craving men.
Now was he Venus, risen from the seas;
And now was he Apollo, white and golden;
Now as Jove sate he in mock-judgment over
The presence at his feet of his slaved lover;
Now was he an acted rite, by one beholden,
In ever-repositioned mysteries.

Now he is something anyone can be.
O white negation of the thing it is!
O golden-haired moon-cold loveliness!
Too cold! too cold! and love as cold as he.
Love wanders through the memories of his vice
As through a labyrinth, in sad madness glad,
And now calls on his name and bids him rise,
And now is smiling at his imaged coming
That is i'th'heart like faces in the gloaming—
Mere shining shadows of the forms they had.

The rain again like a vague pain arose
And put the sense of wetness in the air.
Suddenly did the Emperor suppose
He saw this room and all in it from far.
He saw the couch, the boy and his own frame
Cast down against the couch, and he became
A clearer presence to himself, and said
These words unuttered, save to his soul's dread:

«I shall build thee a statue that will be
To the astonished future evidence
Of my love and thy beauty and the sense
That beauty giveth of infinity,
Though death with subtle uncovering hands remove
The apparel of life and empire from our love,
Yet its nude statue-soul of lust made spirit
All future times, whether they will't or not,
Shall, like a curse-seeming god's boon earth-brought,
Inevitably inherit.

«Ay, this thy statue shall I build, and set
Upon the pinnacle of being-thine. Let Time
By its subtle dim crime
Eat it from life, or with men's violence fret
To pieces out of unity and presence.
Ay, let that be! Our love shall stand so great
In thy statue of us, like a god's fate,
Our love's incarnate and discarnate essence,
That, like a trumpet reaching over seas
And going from continent to continent,
Our love shall speak its joy and woe, death-blent,
Over infinities and eternities!

«The memory of our love shall bridge the ages.
It shall loom white out of the past and be
Eternal, like a Grecian victory,
In every heart the future shall give rages
Of not being our love's contemporary.

«Yet oh that this were needed not, and thou
Wert the red flower perfuming my life,
The garland on