O Corydon, Corydon, quae te dementia cepit!

I fled to the wilderness' edge,
And peered through deep thickets:
Flowers were blooming the field o'er --
Supple of stem, rich, bending to the newborn kiss
Of a morning breeze. The air was slick with the dew
As a weanling calf, soaked in her mother's tongue.
Milk! The air was thick with milk, porous,
Laetitious of spores. O take me! -- I was old.

The sweet juice of seasons hath retained my flesh,
So light, so young; and then I grew dry.
I hardened like a sapling in the world. Pleasure's havoc!
I remember butterflies, once they clattered to meet
Me, crystalline indigo shining faint sprinkles of sunlight.
Hues! Hues have betrayed me, I am hewn merely.

So I rest in slimy reeds, swamps where wild
Oleander mingles with the thorn. I am of a pedigree
With the exhausted creatures of this earth,
Whom our mother, giddy with fresh enterprise, refuses to sustain –
She turns an aspic nipple, desiccated teat
To the forced weanling, supernumerary, one
By one too much. I thought I could sip honey
Suckle, frolic with the fauns forever, and the fields
Would always bloom into a silver sky.

Still I strew girdles of flowers, still I cover myself
In the chaste mantle of time, but the ages are barren now,
And of the nymphs I am forgotten. To be hidden,
Childless with rage, thirsty for silks and pale shadows
That float through the streets like petals fallen in the early dawn:
The overripe moment, concatenation of wilting things,
Retrograde and spoilt, the whole desert world

But for those flowers! How the lily torments me, the amaranth
Drips, one enchanted nook, a starveling corner bathed in birdsong,
Sole symphony in this rutting, cacophonous earth.
Oh desiccated mass of all colliding, mere calamity, and chaos strain:
I am of a genesis with titans, and, having seen and fallen from the sky,
I riot in this ruin. Pile mountain upon mountain,
Unearth this soil swollen with feckless dirt; my age might be ruined,
But my plans are fecund: to steal heavenly fire, or if I cannot
Divert a stream of nectar in a moonbeam, then surely manic blind
I'll roam heaven and earth, tearing at these emulous garlands for sport,
Despoiling the altars of Bacchus, and spitting with a tongue parched in,
And at, my decadent lusts. I swear, lady of rose-petals and wanton lief,
I'll make more stems to fly, I'll strew the world more
Than a cherry spring. For the furnace of my heart is charred,
And charred, and worn, the pale-smoldering face of our mother earth.