Ashamed to be the darling of his grief

He joined a gang of rowdy stories where

His gift for magic quickly made him chief

Of all these boyish powers of the air;

Who turned his hungers into Roman food,

The town's asymmetry into a park;

All hours took taxis; any solitude

Became his flattered duchess in the dark.

But if he wished for anything less grand,

The nights came padding after him like wild

Beasts that meant harm, and all the doors cried Thief;

And when Truth met him and put out her hand,

He clung in panic to his tall belief

And shrank away like an ill-treated child.

The library annoyed him with its look

Of calm belief in being really there;

He threw away a rival's silly book,

And clattered panting up the spiral stair.

Swaying upon the parapet he cried:

"O Uncreated Nothing, set me free

Now let Thy perfect be identified,

Unending passion of the Night, with Thee."

And his long suffering flesh, that all the time

Had felt the simple cravings of the stone

And hoped to be rewarded for her climb,

Took it to be a promise when he spoke

That now at last she would be left alone,

And plunged into the college quad, and broke.

THE THIRD TEMPTATION

He watched with all his organs of concern -

How princes walk, what wives and children say;

Reopened old graves in his heart to learn

What laws the dead had died to disobey.

And came reluctantly to his conclusion:

"All the arm-chair philosophers are false;
To love another adds to the confusion;

The song of pity is the Devil's Waltz."

And bowed to fate and was successful so

That soon he was the king of all the creatures:

Yet, shaking in an autumn nightmare saw,

Approaching down a ruined corridor,

A figure with his own distorted features