A grassy peacock, tailed with dragon stars,
struts upon a canvas creaking heaven;
and delphic angels, pledged to number seven,
fly in choirs of love to holy wars.
The marble arches from old Europe's church
entice a birdlike eye to doff a wing.
Elastic rapture snaps the throat, we sing
with puerile praise that strains aloft to perch.
Oh, then we glow like Gothic saints in glass,
enshrined upon a veiled transparency,
being not ourselves, but being free
to melt like modes in Palestrina's mass.
Pearse Hutchinson
THE NUNS AT THE MEDICAL LECTURE
The nuns at the medical lecture have rose faces
like babies surprised into wisdom, the clerical students
passing the pub look slightly scared, but mainly
serene, the cultured ancient cod in his lamplit room,
lined with the desert fathers and the village idiots
and the palace pomographs, warms the port in his palm
and remarks that passion rages most after innocence
because it is innocent, and rages to corrupt;
the young spongers gape, consoling themselves
for the gap between drinks by considering sagacity,
we
all
sometimes talk like a tenth-rate
so understanding confessor.
Always the maligned force that carries light
achieves its kind revenge, and the velveteen shield
of every proud prig erupts in termed lunacy;
the man in dark glasses was, fancy, at the very same
college a vague few years ago, and buys the boy
