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102
BEAUTY
Who asks of Beauty more than Beauty, asksBut as a dullard, and to Beauty blind:
Air, ocean, earth at their perpetual tasks
Of infinite creation are designed
For senses so insensate all in vain;
Strip off their Beauty, and to such base mind
What matters it, if yet there but remain
Some use immediate for man's wit to find?
Nor what though by Beauty Beauty hath ruined oft
The rarest promise of man's rarest kind,
Turning his pure to foul, his strong to soft,
As poisonous fruit shows fair but in the rind;
Natheless, when Beauty's once as Beauty heeded,
She's that man's soul for its best nurture needed.
August 22nd, 1920.
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