I listened to the hunger-hearted clown,
Sadder than he: I heard a woman sing,—
A tall dark woman in a scarlet gown—
And saw those golden toys the jugglers fling.
I found a tawdry room and there sat I,
There angled for each murmur soft and strange,
The pavement-cries from darkness and below:
I watched the drinkers laugh, the lovers sigh,
And thought how little all the world would change
If clowns were audience, and we the Show.

What starry music are they playing now?
What dancing in this dreary theatre?
Who is she with the moon upon her brow,
And who the fire-foot god that follows her?—
Follows among those unbelieved-in trees
Back-shadowing in their parody of light
Across the little cardboard balustrade;
And we, like that poor Faun who pipes and flees,
Adore their beauty, hate it for too bright,
And tremble, half in rapture, half afraid.

Play on, O furtive and heartbroken Faun!
What is your thin dull pipe for such as they?
I know you blinded by the least white dawn,
And dare you face their quick and quivering Day?
Dare you, like us, weak but undaunted men,
Reliant on some deathless spark in you
Turn your dull eyes to what the gods desire,
Touch the light finger of your goddess; then
After a second's flash of gold and blue,
Drunken with that divinity, expire?

O dance, Diana, dance, Endymion,
Till calm ancestral shadows lay their hands
Gently across mine eyes: in days long gone
Have I not danced with gods in garden lands?
I too a wild unsighted atom borne
Deep in the heart of some heroic boy
Span in the dance ten thousand years ago,
And while his young eyes glittered in the morn
Something of me felt something of his joy,
And longed to rule a body, and to know.

Singer long dead and sweeter-lipped than I,
In whose proud line the soul-dark phrases burn,
Would you could praise their passionate symmetry,
Who loved the colder shapes, the Attic urn.
But your far song, my faint one, what are they,
And what their dance and faery thoughts and ours
Or night abloom with splendid stars and pale?
'Tis an old story that sweet flowers decay,
And dreams, the noblest, die as soon as flowers,
And dancers, all the world of them, must fail.

All the mills in the world are grinding gold grain, 
All hearts in the world like my heart should be fain 
For my foot goes in time to a holiday measure 
And the bird in my bosom is singing for pleasure. 

Tall soldiers in gold stand the plumed ranks of corn, 
And the poppies are dancing for joy of the morn: 
They're gipsies and vagrants, the home-keepers say, 
But my heart is at one with the poppies to-day. 

I know not what end to my travel shall be, 
Or what fairy Prince rides a-seeking for me — 
He may be a Sheogue in graithing of gold, 
Or a graybeard who tarries for young maids and old. 

Meanwhile I go tramping the merry world over, 
With the flower of my heart folded close for my lover: 
Folded safely and close till my Prince come and claim 
The bud long asleep, and the flower turn a flame. 

Meanwhile I go tramping, a masterless maid, 
With flowers blowing for me in sunshine and shade, 
White poppies, red poppies, sea-poppies of amber, 
And a wreath for my head of all wild vines that clamber. 

I am one with the wind and the flowers in the corn 
And I and the wind laugh aloud in our scorn 
At the bedesmen who quarrel earth's meadow-lands over, 
While there's roses on bushes and honey in clover.