Changed indeed and almost stupid
Yielding to analysis
Now a Piccadilly cupid
Hanging on a painted kiss.
Now a toy in two dimensions
Operated by a string
In your hand, whose interventions
Set the object capering.
You who at the higher level
Know love as he truly is
Not the fair Assyrian devil,
Not the poor idolatries,
Of the savage, not the crazes
Say of Shelley, and his set:
But you find him (as your phrase is)
Palm to palm in quiet sweat.
That’s a way, O brother brother
A new way for verse to move
There’s an older and another
Will you listen? way of love.
I from that same terrace waiting
For the music to begin
“Amoureuse” anticipating
Watched a boy who blundered in.
Slim he was, a little stooping
At the shoulders as it seemed,
Eyes on which the lids were drooping
Seeing only what he dreamed.
Where he came was noise and clatter,
But the pandemonium
Either didn’t seem to matter
Where he stood or else grew dumb.
And the waltz the band was creaking,
Like a cluster, round his head
Changed to cry “What’s music seeking
Save what he has left unsaid.”
And like flowers, bourgeois faces
Overtaken by the tune,
Pilfered unimagined graces
From an unimagined June.