. . . Was God, then, so derisive as to shape us
In the image of Priapus? . . .
(Priapus? Who was he?)
Are we never to be left by our desires,
But forever try to warm our foolish hearts
At these illusory fires?
(Priapus! . . . do you mean a terminal figure
In a garden by a sea?)
It is strange! for one so easily conceives
A quieter world, in which the flesh and dust
Are contented, do not hunger, or thirst, or lust. . .

(Priapus! . . . But, I don't know who you mean.
Do you intimate God played some trick upon us? . . .
I will tell you about a pool that I have seen!

It is very old, it is very deep and clear,
No one knows how deep it is,
The ancient trees are about it in an ancient forest,
It is a pool of mysteries!)

. . . It is puzzling, none the less, to understand
How God, if he is less or more than flesh,
Could have devised for us, walking in his garden,
The delicate imperfections of this mesh. . .

(When it is clear, the pool reflects the trees—
Look down, and you will see the flight of a bird
Among the wavering boughs! But when a breeze
Comes slowly from that wood, the pool is stirred,
And a shadow like the skeleton of a cloud
Shivers like a ghost across it, puffs and passes. . .
When it is still, the sky comes back again,
And at the fringes it reflects the grasses.)

. . . Must we always, like Priapus in a wood,
In the underbrush of our perplexities,
Pursue our maidens—pursuer and pursued? . . .

(I will not say it is not sometimes troubled!
It is very old; strange things are imaged there.
Out of its depths at night the stars have bubbled;
And into its depths maidens have hung their hair.
Leaves have fallen into it without number
And never been found again.
Birds have sung above it in the ancient trees.
And sometimes raindrops fall upon it, and then
There are rings of silver upon it, spreading and fading,
Delicately intersecting. . .
But if you return again when the sky is cloudless,
You will find it clear again, and coldly reflecting.
Reflecting the ancient trees of the ancient forest,
And the ancient leaves, ready to fall once more,
And the blue sky under the leaves, old and empty,
And the savage grasses along the shore.)

. . . Priapus, himself, was never disenchanted. . .
Why, then, did God permit us to be haunted
By this sense of imperfections? . . .

(But can a pool remember its reflections?
That is the thing that troubles me!
Does it remember the cloud that falls upon it,
Or the indignation of a tree?
Or suppose that once the image of Priapus
Fell quivering in ferocious sunshine there
As he came suddenly upon it from his forest
With fir-cones in his hair—
Would the pool, through the silences thereafter,
Recall that visitation and be stirred
Any more than it would hear and heed the laughter
Of a swinging ape, or the singing of a bird?)

. . . Was God, then, so derisive as to shape us
In the image of Priapus? . . .

(It is very old, it is very deep and clear,
No one knows how deep it is!
The ancient trees are about it in an ancient forest,
It is a pool of mysteries.)