Lay buried in the flowers._

Then in his wrath arose
Apollo, lord of light,
That shows
The wrong deed from the right;

And by what radiant laws
O'erruling human needs,
The cause
To consequence proceeds;

How balanced is the sway
He gives each mortal doom:
How day
Demands the atoning gloom:

How all good things await
The soul that pays the price
To Fate
By equal sacrifice;

And how on him that sleeps
For less than labour's sake
There creeps
Uncharmed, the Pythian snake.

III

Lulled by the wash of the feathery grasses, a sea with many a sun-swept
billow,
Heart to heart in the heart of the summer, lover by lover asleep
they lay,
Hearing only the whirring cicala that chirruped awhile at their
poppied pillow
Faint and sweet as the murmur of men that laboured in villages far
away.

Was not the menace indeed more silent? Ah, what care for labour and
sorrow?
Gods in the meadows of moly and amaranth surely might envy their deep
sweet bed
Here where the butterflies troubled the lilies of peace, and took no
thought for the morrow,
And golden-girdled bees made feast as over the lotus the soft sun
spread.

Nearer, nearer the menace glided, out of the gorgeous gloom around
them,
Out of the poppy-haunted shadows deep in the heart of the purple
brake;
Till through the hush and the heat as they lay, and their own sweet
listless dreams enwound them,--
Mailed and mottled with hues of the grape-bloom suddenly, quietly,
glided the snake.

Subtle as jealousy, supple as falsehood, diamond-headed and cruel as
pleasure,
Coil by coil he lengthened and glided, straight to the fragrant curve
of her throat:
There in the print of the last of the kisses that still glowed red from
the sweet long pressure,
Fierce as famine and swift as lightning over the glittering lyre he
smote.

IV

And over the cold white body of love and delight
Orpheus arose in the terrible storm of his grief,
With quivering up-clutched hands, deadly and white,
And his whole soul wavered and shook like a wind-swept leaf:

As a leaf that beats on a mountain, his spirit in vain