by Eliot · Cluster: Flowers · Spring · Garden
Abstract
Mythological lyric set in Circe’s enchanted, sinister garden of fanged flowers, panthers and a python, where beasts have the eyes of men once known; menace, enchantment and degradation.
Connections
Archetypes: Witch Enchantress, Temptress Motifs: Garden, Flowers, Animals, Serpent Snake Themes & Concepts: Temptation, Grotesque Forms & Genres: Lyric Historical References: Greek Mythology Settings: Garden (2) Characters: Odysseus Ulysses
Testo integrale / Full text
Circe’s Palace
Around her fountain which flows
With the voice of men in pain‚
Are flowers that no man knows.
Their petals are fanged and red
With hideous streak and stain;
They sprang from the limbs of the dead. —
We shall not come here again.
Panthers rise from their lairs
In the forest which thickens below,
Along the garden stairs
The sluggish python lies;
The peacocks walk, stately and slow,
And they look at us with the eyes
Of men whom we knew long ago.
On a Portrait
Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown
To us of restless brain and weary feet,
Forever hurrying, up and down the street,
She stands at evening in the room alone.
Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone
But evanescent, as if one should meet
A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat,
An immaterial fancy of one’s own.
No meditations glad or ominous
Disturb her lips, or move the slender hands;
Her dark eyes keep their secrets hid from us,
Beyond the circle of our thought she stands.
The parrot on his bar, a silent spy,
Regards her with a patient curious eye.