ight
That for its core enshrined a naked youth,
Golden and fierce. She knew the God sans ruth,
Him who had given woeful prescience to her,
Apollo, once her lover and her wooer;
Who stood as one stands glorying in his grace
And strength, full in the sun, though on her place
Within the temple court no sun at all
Shone, nor as yet upon the topmost wall
Was any tinge of him, but all showed gray
And sodden in the wind and blown sea-spray.
Not to him dared she lift her voice in prayer,
Nor scarce her eyes to see him.
To him there
Came swift a spirit in shape of virgin slim,
With snooded hair and kirtle belted trim,
Short to the knee; and in her face the gale
Had blown bright sanguine colour. Free and hale
She was; and in her hand she held a bow
Unstrung, and o'er her shoulders there did go
A baldrick that made sharp the cleft betwixt
Her sudden breasts--to that a quiver fixt,
Showing gold arrow-points. No God there is
In Heaven more swift than Delian Artemis,
The young, the pure health-giver of the Earth,
Who loveth all things born, and brings to birth,
And after slays with merciful sudden death--
In whom is gladness all and wholesome breath,
And to whom all the praise of him who writes,
Ever.
These two she saw like meteorites
Flare down the wind and burn afar, then fade.
And Leto next, a mother grave and staid,
Drave out her chariot, which two winged stags drew,
Swift following, robed in gown of inky blue,
And hooded; and her hand which held the hood
Gleamed like a patch of snow left in a wood
Where hyacinths bring down to earth the sky.
And in her wake a winging company,
Dense as the cloud of gulls which from a rock
At sea lifts up in myriads, if the knock
Of oars assail their peace, she saw, and mourned
The household gods. For outward they too turned,
The spirits of the streams and water-brooks,
And nymphs who haunt the pastures, or in nooks
Of woodlands dwell. There like a lag of geese
Flew in long straying lines the Oreades
That in wild dunes and commons have their haunt;
There sped the Hamadryads; there aslant,
As from the sea, but wheeling ere they crost
Their sisters, thronged the river-nymphs, a host;
And now the Gods of homestead and the hearth,
Like sad-fac