ISIS

In the cool pillared portico

        That gives white entrance to her moods

Start‑lovely stand in a mute row

        The statues of her pulchritudes.

Twelve are they and the mind doth gather

        Their separate seen lives to one sense;

The thirteenth, which is all together,

        Means her soul and its confluence.

Five statues mean the senses five,

        Seven are her mysteries of Thought

The thirteenth seems somehow to live

        Beside her life and know it not.

The summer lies outside her shades,

        The breezes creep into her halls,

And from her windowed loss the glades

        Are something that the soul recalls.

She built her house with heavenly types

        Of building in her inner seeing.

The Sun makes the long pillars stripes

        On the cold, hard floors of her being.

Yet she is absent and despairing,

        Her statues await her New Hour,

And from the shadows of her hearing

        The whisper of the drones doth flower.

This was not anyhow nor when.

        All was as cool as dreams are cool

When breezes creep up to our pain

        And we are laid beside a pool,

And a far larger pool arises

        In our restored imagining,

And all our body's sense despises

        Our innate lack of fin and wing.

Still by her portico I stopped.

        The shadows there were clear and fast.

Slightlys as with a kiss, I hoped,

        And Having, like a swallow, passed.