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| THIS the house of Circe, queen of charms,— | |
| A kind of beacon-cauldron pois’d on high, | |
| Hoop’d round with ember-clasping iron bars, | |
| Sways in her palace porch, and smoulderingly | |
| Drips out in blots of fire and ruddy stars: | 5 |
| But out behind that trembling furnace air | |
| The lands are ripe and fair, | |
| Hush are the hills and quiet to the eye. | |
| The river’s reach goes by | |
| With lamb and holy tower and squares of corn, | 10 |
| And shelving interspace | |
| Of holly bush and thorn | |
| And hamlets happy in an Alpine morn, | |
| And deep-bower’d lanes with grace | |
| Of woodbine newly born. | 15 |
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| But inward o’er the hearth a torch-head stands | |
| Inverted, slow green flames of fulvous hue, | |
| Echoed in wave-like shadows over her. | |
| A censer’s swing-chain set in her fair hands | |
| Dances up wreaths of intertwisted blue | 20 |
| In clouds of fragrant frankincense and myrrh. | |
| A giant tulip head and two pale leaves | |
| Grew in the midmost of her chamber there. | |
| A flaunting bloom, naked and undivine, | |
| Rigid and bare, | 25 |
| Gaunt as a tawny bond-girl born to shame, | |
| With freckled cheeks and splotch’d side serpentine, | |
| A gipsy among flowers, | |
| Unmeet for bed or bowers, | |
| Virginal where pure-handed damsels sleep: | 30 |
| Let it not breathe a common air with them, | |
| Lest when the night is deep, | |
| And all things have their quiet in the moon, | |
| Some birth of poison from its leaning stem | |
| Waft in between their slumber-parted lips, | 35 |
| And they cry out or swoon, | |
| Deeming some vampire sips | |
| Where riper Love may come for nectar boon! | |
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| And near this tulip, rear’d across a loom, | |
| Hung a fair web of tapestry half done, | 40 |
| Crowding with folds and fancies half the room: | |
| Men eyed as gods, and damsels still as stone, | |
| Pressing their brows alone, | |
| In amethystine robes, | |
| Or reaching at the polish’d orchard globes, | 45 |
| Or rubbing parted love-lips on their rind, | |
| While the wind | |
| Sows with sere apple-leaves their breast and hair. | |
| And all the margin there | |
| Was arabesqued and border’d intricate | 50 |
| With hairy spider things, | |
| That catch and clamber, | |
| And salamander in his dripping cave | |
| Satanic ebon-amber; | |
| Blind worm, and asp, and eft of cumbrous gait, | 55 |
| And toads who love rank grasses near a grave, | |
| And the great goblin moth, who bears | |
| Between his wings the ruin’d eyes of death; | |
| And the enamell’d sails | |
| Of butterflies, who watch the morning’s breath, | 60 |
| And many an emerald lizard with quick ears | |
| Asleep in rocky dales; | |
| And for outer fringe, embroider’d small, | |
| A ring of many locusts, horny-coated, | |
| A round of chirping tree-frogs merry-throated, | 65 |
| And sly, fat fishes sailing, watching all. | |
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