Classic Poem

MY WHITE tiger bounding in the west!
Only eternal, animal and dumb,
Give me my merited rest.
The end of Time is when my time is come.

My two arc-lamp globes muttering light
My thorax of wild woodbine offered
Staid, fiery and slight.
My dark room where voiceless chairs are proferred.

My green dragon from the barbarous east!
Bring the light with ropes of shaken rain
April swells in yeast,
A baffled virgin with a knocking brain;

The flesh bound in flat, rasping scales,
Reptile, to your fugacity I cling.
My witch of nursery tales,
My everything, my thou, my everything!

Gannets casually stab the sea.
Each hunting wave envies the next its pleasure,
Surround me
The spine is blank, body is pure measure.

Marble protectress with vigilant breasts,
His enemy armed against the curious sun,
Safe in the dark, the chests
May be opened and your treasure won.

My black tortoise from the hatching north!
Geysers and hissing streams, the landlocked sea
Are back and forth
Beneath the snail and the sleeper with crooked knee.

My olive naiad in Ionian creeks
My ballad maiden raped in Highland forays,
World all in fable speaks,
My gun-flanked heroine of detective stories.

Rise and look out the window and dress,
Mother with child, old man with mottled laughter,
World, be my guest!
And sleep again, go to sleep after

My feast: I'm blind! if oiled athletes preen
Their animal in the glass, if priests refute
Seen with divine unseen,
I'm dumb, my world, without your light, I'm mute.

Return my early my Lisbon rapture, the galleons
Glittered in from Goa rich and mean,
Immoderate life stallions,
And the sky in chevalier plume-doff of green

And scarlet kept the burghers in suspense:
Flitter and flit, let others envy me,
Starling, starlet, what pretense
Could any mortal make to let you be?

Dancing with you is dancing with
Water, ashes kindle on my mouth
To inforMyou with,
O my red phoenix from the south!