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