Evening is clogged with gnats as the light fails,

And branches bloom with gold and copper screams

Of birds with fancy prices on their tails

To plume a lady’s gear; the motet wails

Through Africa upon dissimilar themes.

A little snuff-box whereon Daphnis sings

In pale enamels, touching love’s defeat,

Calls up the color of her underthings

And plays upon the taut memorial strings,

Trailing her laces down into this heat.

One day he found, topped with a smutty grin,

The small corpse of a monkey, partly eaten.

Force of the sun had split the bluish skin,

Which, by their questioning and entering in,

A swarm of bees had been concerned to sweeten.

He could distill no essence out of this.

That yellow majesty and molten light

Should bless this carcass with a sticky kiss

Argued a brute and filthy emphasis.

The half-moons of the finger-nails were white,

And where the nostrils opened on the skies,

Issuing to the sinus, where the ant

Crawled swiftly down to undermine the eyes

Of cloudy aspic, nothing could diguise

How terribly the thing looked like Philinte.

Will-o-the-wisp, on the scum laden water,

Burns in the night, a gaseous deceiver,

In the pale shade of France’s foremost daughter.

Heat gives his thinking cavity no quarter,

For he is burning with the monkey’s fever.

Before the bees have diagramed their comb

Within the skull, before summer has cracked

The back of Daphnis, naked, polychrome,

Paris shall see the tempered exile home,

Peruked and stately for the final act.