You said, “This is the time of the wild spring and the mating of the tigers,
This is the first vintage of the heat like the budding of wild vines —
The budding of emeralds and the emerald climate,

When flowers change into rainbows and young insects
Are happy, the people have heart-strings like the music
Of the great suns, oh never to be quenched by darkness.

But I am the water-carrier to the Damned, and dark as water.
Only those nights, my eyes, have no more rain
And dead are the merciful fountains
Since the world changed into a stone again.

I am the grave of the unpitied Sisyphus,
My heart, that rolled the universe, a stone
Changed to me, like your heart, up endless mountains.”

I SAW the Gold Man with the lion’s head
Reflected deep
In the waters of the well when in the great heat
I went to draw their cold: he gave to me a flower
Petalled with gold and glittering beams, and said,
“You must not tell
What you have seen reflected,”

(The King to whom my sister flower the Marigold
Turns her bright head . . . )
But mine is another Sun. Come from the night, Cophetua!
I will unclose my corolla to my Sun —
Still wet with the tears of night, each golden beam
About my head! But with your rising, they are gone.

I am your Marigold, O royal star!

My birth was Darkness. But your light
Gave me the corolla of my bright flower
Like to your crown!

The Kings bow their bright shining heads adown —
Like flowers of the Sun, those marigolds!
But the Sun of Fate has beat on them till they grew faint
And flaccid, no more fit
To bear the corolla of a bright crown.

“Kings and bright lovers all must come to this—”
So sighed the dews of night that from the leaf
Fade and are gone.

Yet when in a thick and cloudy air none may espy
Your beauty, so obscured . . . I
Still turn to you the bright beams of my head, my golden skin,
And close in your golden beams for my long night,
O royal star, for whom the poor Marigold must live and die!