The Rue-Anemone

Under an oak-tree in a woodland, where     The dreaming Spring had dropped it from her hair,     I found a flower, through which I seemed to gaze     Beyond the world and see what no man dare     Behold and live the myths of bygone days     Diana and Endymion, and the bare     Slim beauty of the boy whom Echo wooed;     And Hyacinthus whom Apollo dewed     With love and death: and Daphne, ever fair;     And that reed-slender girl whom Pan pursued.     I stood and gazed and through it seemed to see     The Dryad dancing by the forest tree,     Her hair wild blown: the Faun with listening ear,     Deep in the boscage, kneeling on one knee,     Watching the wandered Oread draw near,     Her wild heart beating like a honey-bee     Within a rose. All, all the myths of old,     All, all the bright shapes of the Age of Gold,     Peopling the wonder-worlds of Poetry,     Through it I seemed in fancy to behold.     What other flower, that, fashioned like a star,     Draws its frail life from earth and braves the war     Of all the heavens, can suggest the dreams     That this suggests? in which no trace of mar     Or soil exists: where stainless innocence seems     Enshrined; and where, beyond our vision far,     That inaccessible beauty, which the heart     Worships as truth and holiness and art,     Is symbolized; wherein embodied are     The things that make the soul's immortal part.