The Lady And The Earthenware Head

Fired in sanguine clay, the model head

Fit nowhere: brickdust-complected, eye under a dense lid,

On the long bookshelf it stood

Stolidly propping thick volumes of prose: spite-set

Ape of her look. Best rid

Hearthstone at once of the outrageous head;

Still, she felt loath to junk it.

No place, it seemed, for the effigy to fare

Free from all molesting. Rough boys,

Spying a pate to spare

Glowering sullen and pompous from an ash-heap,

Might well seize this prize,

Maltreat the hostage head in shocking wise,

And waken the sly nerve up

That knits to each original its coarse copy. A dark tarn

She thought of then, thick-silted, with weeds obscured,

To serve her exacting turn:

But out of the watery aspic, laureled by fins,

The simulacrum leered,

Lewdly beckoning, and her courage wavered:

She blenched, as one who drowns,

And resolved more ceremoniously to lodge

The mimic head—in a crotched willow, green-

Vaulted by foliage:

Let bell-tongued birds descant in blackest feather

On the rendering, grain by grain,

Of that uncouth shape to simple sod again

Through drear and dulcet weather.

Yet, shrined on her shelf, the grisly visage endured,

Despite her wrung hands, her tears, her praying: Vanish!

Steadfast and evil-starred,

It ogled through rock-fault, wind-flaw and fisted wave—

An antique hag-head, too tough for knife to finish,

Refusing to diminish

By one jot its basilisk-look of love.