The Stages of Narcissus

To the memory of Robert Shelley

Was it his face that so unsettled him?

-For it was beautiful and childly wise.

One day he watched a water-spider skim

Across the pool, and then to his surprise

He found his image on the surface and

He could not cease to wonder at the sight

Of so much grace. His very life was planned

By this unwished-for providence. He might

Go on pretending that he didn't know,

But people in their drawing-rooms would show

Him as a thing of some refinement, sought

For all his wit or common sense alone,

While in their secret cells they railed and fought

Like stray dogs yapping over a choice bone.

Take any subway to the nearest place-

He's standing like a statue in the crowd,

And schoolgirls titter when they see his face

Dejected, over-serious, soft and proud.

They edge about him in the evening rush,

Fragile as sparks struck from electric rails.

How can they know, who are in their first flush,

His ageless innocence? The current fails,

The lights go out. He hears the jangling bells

And for a moment dreams he's somewhere else:

A cage where sunlight tiger-stripes the floor,

Guiding the eyebeams of the human beast

To his bent form. The lights come on once more.

Leaving the train, he steps into the feast.

Day-long upon the baked or windy street

The passing citizens would be like flies

Engulfing him, till at his restless feet

The very pavement bristled with their eyes.

If night was kind to him it made his face,

Beneath its glow, and amber-lighted bronze,

Leaving his form enhanced by this embrace.

At evening in the park, beside the ponds,

He walked among the statues who were dumb,

Who could not hear his step or tell him from

The solid citizenry of the sculptured dead.

But from the benches of the caged park

The eyes peered out at him and made him dread

The will to live which terrorized the dark.

Had he foreseen, since that discovery-day,

The nature and the passion of his fall?

The sunlight beats the panes but will not stay.

He shuts his eyes and feels the bedroom wall

Fill up with shadow till his form is trapped

Like a fossil pressed in subterranean jaws-

Himself, his wits, his consciousness unsnapped,

Jag-toothed and throbbing. Did he know the laws

That tie a man in knots but leave him whole,

Still perfect, less than mortal, with a soul

That spends the fiery blood and suffocates

Within the dark-the mountainous dark-alone?

Breathless he had escaped his human fates

And learned in life the rectitude of stone.

Would his essential beauty shrink and rot

And sift to dust in some unhallowed place?

In bashful belles the rarest beauty-spot

Glows but a day, blood ranging in the face,

Relinquished in the end to old gravures.

Is this the vengeance of the fixed Ideal

That every beast and common whore endures?

Then let them live. Old age will make them feel

Like window-dummies stripped from limb to limb.

That night he dreamed a woman followed him,

Calling him softly by his childhood name.

He turned his face and ran away for blocks

Till out of breath he stopped and she became

A thin far echo, lost in the sounding clocks.

Why should paternal Heaven wish to keep

This image which a mirror cannot hold?

Better to lose oneself in a quartz sleep

Than bear the indignity of growing old.

And what if humans chisel at the quartz

And set it up beneath the general eye?

Why, then a more supreme indifference starts,

Locked in the stone, descended from the sky,

Ascended from the windings of the earth.

By the still pool he had his second birth,

Studying his imagery in fateful springs,

He leaned more closely, hunching his thin spine.

Kissing his face, he shivered it in rings.

And the dream passed in broken water-shine.

Where does the form go after banishment?

In time the corpse becomes a pile of bones,

But as the flesh declines the form is sent

Into the pool which dissipates the tones,

Then through the underworld it starts to wind,

Dragging the frail Narcissus in its tow,

Tumbling from cave to cave until men find

That all the earth is flowered by its flow.

Woman, beside what fountain do you dare

To pick his flower and flaunt it in your hair?

Here lies the virgin boy-bound in his bed

With no fair love, no marriageable heart.

By day the world pursued him and he fled

To its dark night, where the pure waters start.