Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—a sure thing.
Yet how elusive the Mediterranean
Light on the limits of our imagining.
Our human
Thought and its vagaries attend forever the birth
Of Aphrodite. From the tumultuous blue,
Out of these waters at an early dawn
Earth
Received her, lusting with spring, and knew
Only the pleasure of the delighted lawn.
Signs might have cried: Keep off.—but the happy heart
Conceded the beachhead. We were insatiably lured,
And later, patched up by religion and art for art,
Falteringly inured
Somehow to manage again, except for the one
Haunted chamber opposing the regular commerce.
We are affected, incurably saddened and mad.
What’s done
Must be endured, no matter how you coerce
Past thunder’s shanty her smile in a tattered ad.
She won’t be mocked. The stunt once pulled has blunted
Only the agent. What lives in a farmer’s glance
Or a child’s as they look, the growth of wonder granted
Is in advance
Of salesmanship. Imponderable accounts
Are started,—a full task force of the feature
Enchantment has put ashore. Responsibility
Mounts
Like water. The insurmountable creature
Dawn in her eyes is rising from the sea.
And we, between Botticelli and Keats’ Ode
On a Grecian Urn, must suffer the punishments
Of standards illicit as Helen which will goad
Men and events
Into ulterior compulsion. The Trojan war,
Too, had its profiteers, and neither am I
Now stable. The surface trembles on which I write.
We are
Convulsed with righteous insincerity
Each stands unaided in a failing light.
O Aphrodite, striking at the core
Of injudicious loving, spoil our show.
What little town by river or seashore
Will grow
A radioactive vapor like Hephaistos’
Slow lifting smoke against an empty sky?
Deflect, we pray, the photogenic plane.
Once
Monstrous, virulent in agony
Past its satiric tilt, despair is vain.
Herbert Schaumann 1909-1982
Graphic - Antonio Canova 1757-1822
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