The last silk-floating thought has gone from the dandelion stem,
And the flesh of the stalk holds up for nothing a blank diadem.

So night's flood-winds have lifted my last desire from me,
And my hollow flesh stands up in the night like vanity.

As I stand on this hill, with the whitening cave of the city in front
And this Helen beside me, I am blank; being nothing, I bear the brunt

Of the nightly heavens overhead, like an immense, open eye,
Like a cat's distended pupil, that sparkles with little stars
As with thoughts that flash and crackle in far-off malignancy,
So distant, they cannot touch me, whom now nothing mars.

In front of me, yes, up the darkness, goes the gush of the lights of two towns,
As the breath which rushes upwards from the nostrils of an immense
Beast crouched across the globe, ready, if need be, to pounce
Across the space on the cat in heaven's hostile eminence.

All round me, above and below, the night's twin consciousness roars
With sounds that endlessly swell and sink like the storm of thought in the brain,
Lifting and falling, long gasps through the sluices, like silence that pours
Through invisible pulses, slowly, filling the night's dark vein.

The night is immense and awful, yet to me it is nothing at all.
Or rather 'tis I am nothing, here in the fur of the heather
Like an empty dandelion stalk, bereft of connection, small
And nakedly nothing 'twixt world and heaven, two creatures hostile together.

I in the fur of the world, alone; but this Helen close by!
How we hate one another to-night, hate, she and I
To numbness and nothingness; I dead, she refusing to die.
The female whose venom can more than kill, can numb and then nullify.

Mark, how yond eddy steals away
From the rude stream into the bay;
There, lock'd up safe, she doth divorce
Her waters from the channel's course,
And scorns the torrent that did bring
Her headlong from her native spring.
Now doth she with her new love play,
Whilst he runs murmuring away.
Mark how she courts the banks, whilst they
As amorously their arms display,
T' embrace, and clip her silver waves:
See how she strokes their sides, and craves
An entrance there, which they deny;
Whereat she frowns, threat'ning to fly
Home to her stream, and 'gins to swim
Backward, but from the channel's brim
Smiling returns into the creek,
With thousand dimples on her cheek.
       Be thou this eddy, and I'll make
My breast thy shore, where thou shalt take
Secure repose, and never dream
Of the quite forsaken stream;
Let him to the wide ocean haste,
There lose his colour, name, and taste:
Thou shalt save all, and, safe from him,
Within these arms forever swim.