THE VENUS CALLIPYGE.
IN THE MUSEUM BORBONICO, NAPLES.
SPIRIT, unborn and undying, thy presence
Shadoweth forth a sublimer sphere:
Of Beauty and Love the immaculate essence,
Which men and immortals alike revere!
Thou, in the minds of the ancients, haunting
A fancy, most lovely, if hardly chaste,
Gavest a charm that to earth was wanting
In the Venus by whom their faith was graced.
Shapes of Beauty they had, which awed us,
Shapes of Beauty, austere and cold―
O, how unlike their voluptuous goddess,
Cast by Love in his softest mould!
Warmer colors than those of summer
Welcomed her from the Paphian wave,
Which wantoned around the celestial corner
Half hiding the beauties it loved to lave.
She, the light of her presence giving
To Art, soon rendered the canvas warm;
And even the marble rock grew living
And breathing with her developed form.
Surely, in some entrancèd vision
Of him who sculptured this statue, bright
And blooming creatures from bowers elysian
Glanced on his soul with their looks of light.
There are times, when the senses, immuring
The spirit, in passive slumber lie,
And it catches, 'mid earth-clouds half obscuring
Glimpses in dreams of its native sky.
Ye who, with vague, irrepressible yearning,
At Beauty's shrines have in spirit knelt,
Who a power and a passion, burning
The lava-mould of your hearts, have felt―
Come―if such be in truth your nature―
And gaze, with your parchèd
lips apart,
On this perfection of form and feature;
Nature outdone by her sister, Art.
Gaze―as on
Ida naught concealing,
Floats the robe from her rounded arms;
So, with a triumph-blush, revealing
To rivals and arbiter matchless charms.
Never again to the young desire
Will aught so graceful and glowing be given―
Breathe, while ye may, the ambrosial fire
And sensuous joy of the Grecian heaven!
From A Vision of Faery Land and Other Poems (Boston, 1853), 93-95.
