The world is growing gentle, But few know what she owes To the understanding lily And the judgment of the rose.

Once a pallid Vestal Doubted truth in blue; Listed red in ruin, Harried every hue; Barricaded vision, Garbed herself in sighs; Ridiculed the birthmarks Of the butterflies.

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy, And the janitor's boy loves me; He's going to hunt for a desert isle In our geography.

The sign work of the Orient it runneth up and down; The Talmud stalks from right to left, a rabbi in a gown; The Roman rolls from left to right from Maytime unto May; But the gods shake up their symbols in an absent-minded way. Their language runs to circles like the language of the eyes, Emphasised by strange dilations with little panting sighs.

The very serpents bite their tails; the bees forget to sting, For a language so celestial setteth up a wondering. And the touch of absent mindedness is more than any line, Since direction counts for nothing when the gods set up a sign.

When you return, the youngest of the seers, Released from fetters of ancestral pose, There will be beauty waiting down the years Revisions of the ruby and the rose.

There is a glory in a great mistake.