Say that it is a crude effect, black reds,

Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are

To be anything else in the sunlight of the room,

Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor,

Too actual, things that in being real

Make any imaginings of them lesser things.

And yet this effect is a consequence of the way

We feel and, therefore, is not real, except

In our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,

Of yellow as first color and of white,

In which the sense lies still, as a man lies,

Enormous, in a completing of his truth.

Our sense of these things changes and they change,

Not as in metaphor, but in our sense

Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.

It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.

It is like a flow of meanings with no speech

And of as many meanings as of men.

We are two that use these roses as we are,

In seeing them. This is what makes them seem

So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch.