What lunacy is this, that night-long tries,

With seven or seventy or ten thousand words,

To compass God in heaven, the loved one’s eyes?

Alas! were the whole language changed to birds,

And I Prince Prospero to set them free,

Though I should hide all heaven with beating wings,

Still the essential would escape, still be

Unspoken, dumb, like all essential things.

Love, let me be the beginning world, and grow

To Time from Timelessness, and out of Time

Create magnificent Chaos, and there sow

The immortal stars, and teach those stars to rhyme—

Even so, alas, I could in no sense move

From the begin-all-end-all phrase, “I love.”