Page:Tristram of Lyonesse and other poems (IA tristramoflyonesswinrich).pdf/27

 Forms without form, a piteous people and blind, Men and no men, whose lamentable kind The shadow of death and shadow of life compel Through semblances of heaven and false-faced hell, Through dreams of light and dreams of darkness tost On waves innavigable, are these so lost? Shapes that wax pale and shift in swift strange wise, Void faces with unspeculative eyes, Dim things that gaze and glare, dead mouths that move, Featureless heads discrowned of hate and love, Mockeries and masks of motion and mute breath, Leavings of life, the superflux of death— If these things and no more than these things be Left when man ends or changes, who can see? Or who can say with what more subtle sense Their subtler natures taste in air less dense A life less thick and palpable than ours, Warmed with faint fires and sweetened with dead flowers And measured by low music? how time fares In that wan time-forgotten world of theirs, Their pale poor world too deep for sun or star To live in, where the eyes of Helen are, And hers who made as God’s own eyes to shine The eyes that met them of the Florentine, Wherein the godhead thence transfigured lit All time for all men with the shadow of it? Ah, and these too felt on them as God’s grace The pity and glory of this man’s breathing face;