Siegfried Sassoon, 'Solar Eclipse'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Solar Eclipse

Observe these blue solemnities of sky
Offering for the academes of after-ages
A mythologic welkin freaked with white!
  Listen: one tiny tinkling rivulet
Accentuates the super-sultry stillness
That drones on ripening landscapes which imply
Serene Parnassus plagued with amorous goats.

Far down the vale Apollo has pursued
The noon-bedazzled nymph whose hunted heart
Holds but the trampling panic whence it fled.
And now the heavens are piled with darkening trouble
And counter-march of clouds that troop intent
Fire-crested into conflict.
Daphne turns
At the wood’s edge in bronze and olive gloom:
Sckness assails the sun, whose blazing disc
Dwindles: the Eden of those auburn slopes
Lours in the tarnished copper of eclipse.

Yet virgin, in her god-impelled approach
To Græco-Roman ravishment, she waits
While the unsated python slides to crush
Her lust-eluding fleetness. Envious Jove
Rumbles Olympus. All the classic world
Leans breathless toward the legend she creates.

From thunderous vapour smites the immortal beam . . .
Then, crowned with fangs of foliage, flames the god.
Apollo! . . . Up the autumn valley echoes
A hollow shout from nowhere. Daphne’s limbs
Lapse into laureldom: green-shadowed flesh
Writhes arborescent: glamour obscures her gaze
With blind and bossed distortion. She escapes.

By Siegfried Sassoon