free-verse36 lines
Bad Dreams III
by Robert BrowningThis was my dream: I saw a Forest
Old as the earth, no track nor trace
Of unmade man. Thou, Soul, explorest,
Though in a trembling rapture, space
Immeasurable! Shrubs, turned trees,
Trees that touch heaven, support its frieze
Studded with sun and moon and star:
While, oh, the enormous growths that bar
Mine eye from penetrating past
Their tangled twins where lurks, nay, lives
Royally lone, some brute-type cast
I' the rough, time cancels, man forgives.
On, Soul! I saw a lucid City
Of architectural device
Every way perfect. Pause for pity,
Lightning! nor leave a cicatrice
On those bright marbles, dome and spire,
Structures palatial, streets which mire
Dares not defile, paved all too fine
For human footstep's smirch, not thine,
Proud solitary traverser,
My Soul, of silent lengths of way,
With what ecstatic dread, aver,
Lest life start sanctioned by thy stay!
All, but the last sight was the hideous!
A City, yes, a Forest, true,
But each devouring each. Perfidious
Snake-plants had strangled what I knew
Was a pavilion once: each oak
Held on his horns some spoil he broke
By surreptitiously beneath
Upthrusting: pavements, as with teeth,
Griped huge weed widening crack and split
In squares and circles stone-work erst.
Oh, Nature, good! Oh, Art, no whit
Less worthy! Both in one, accurst!