I thought of my faculty of poetry
As of the eye
The bream or white-bait showed
In its hysterical dance of death
When the receding tide
Left it asleep
In a shallow pool on the shore.
Why did I fail to take it?
Was I strangely compassionate
Or merely afraid to touch
The jerking spasm of flesh
With the still eye?
Or was it I on the shore
In the shallow pool, left by the tide,
Engaged in that mystic dance of death,
Twenty years before?
