About your brow a starry wreath,
About your feet a wilderness,
Where young hot hopes grow cold beneath
The tangled bondage of the press.
Set like a saint within a niche—
A strait and narrow niche—you hide,
And weave a veil about you, which
Can turn our steel, Saint Bride, Saint Bride.
The eyes of coarse and pond’rous man
Are sceptic and satirical.