On The Medusa Of Leonardo Da Vinci In The Florentine Gallery.

1.     It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,     Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;     Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;     Its horror and its beauty are divine.     Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie     Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,     Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,     The agonies of anguish and of death.     2.     Yet it is less the horror than the grace     Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone,     Whereon the lineaments of that dead face     Are graven, till the characters be grown     Into itself, and thought no more can trace;     'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown     Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,     Which humanize and harmonize the strain.     3.     And from its head as from one body grow,     As ... grass out of a watery rock,     Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow     And their long tangles in each other lock,     And with unending involutions show     Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock     The torture and the death within, and saw     The solid air with many a ragged jaw.     4.     And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft     Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;     Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft     Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise     Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,     And he comes hastening like a moth that hies     After a taper; and the midnight sky     Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.     5.     'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;     For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare     Kindled by that inextricable error,     Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air     Become a ... and ever-shifting mirror     Of all the beauty and the terror there -     A woman's countenance, with serpent-locks,     Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks.