Trapped by the limping husband unaware,

Fast in each other’s arms, and faster in the snare—

And laughed remembering. Sometimes his thought

Went wandering over the earth and sought

Familiar places—temples by the sea,

Cities and islands; here a sacred tree

And there a cavern of shy nymphs.

And there a cavern of shy nymphs.He rolled

About his bed, in many a rich fold

Crumpling his Babylonian coverlet,

And yawned and stretched. The smell of his own sweat

Brought back to mind his Libyan desert-fane

Of mottled granite, with its endless train

Of pilgrim camels, reeking towards the sky

Ammonian incense to his hornèd deity;

The while their masters worshipped, offering

Huge teeth of ivory, while some would bring

Their Ethiop wives—sleek wineskins of black silk,

Jellied and huge from drinking asses’ milk

Through years of tropical idleness, to pray

For offspring (whom he ever sent away

With prayers unanswered, lest their ebon race

Might breed and blacken the earth’s comely face).

Noon pressed on him a hotter, heavier weight.

O Love in Idleness! how celibate

He felt! Libido like a nemesis

Scourged him with itching memories of bliss.

The satin of imagined skin was sleek

And supply warm against his lips and cheek,

And deep within soft hair’s dishevelled dusk

His eyelids fluttered; like a flowery musk

The scent of a young body seemed to float

Faintly about him, close and yet remote—

For perfume and the essence of music dwell

In other worlds among the asphodel

Of unembodied life. Then all had flown;

His dream had melted. In his bed, alone,

Jove sweating lay and moaned, and longed in vain

To still the pulses of his burning pain.

In sheer despair at last he leapt from bed,

Opened the window and thrust forth his head

Into Olympian ether. One fierce frown

Rifted the clouds, and he was looking down

Into a gulf of azure calm; the rack

Seethed round about, tempestuously black;

But the god’s eye could hold its angry thunders back.

There lay the world, down through the chasméd blue,

Stretched out from edge to edge unto his view;

And in the midst, bright as a summer’s day

At breathless noon, the Mediterranean lay;

And Ocean round the world’s dim fringes tossed

His glaucous waves in mist and distance lost;

And Pontus and the livid Caspian Sea

Stirred in their nightmare sleep uneasily.

And ’twixt the seas rolled the wide fertile land,

Dappled with green and tracts of tawny sand,

And rich, dark fallows and fields of flowers aglow

And the white, changeless silences of snow;

While here and there towns, like a living eye