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| Moon in the Belt of Venus just after sunset |
A passion for things as they are
can make the purest poetry,
verse without metaphor can be
an electric truth with the telling detail,
doing the highest possible justice
to the visible world, believing as Yeats believed
that a "perfect and kindly world" still exists,
buried like a mass of roses under spadefuls of earth.
(Well, perhaps not without metaphor.)
But the moon last night rose full from the sea,
floated up through the shadow of the earth
to hang in the mauve Belt of Venus
with the transit of gulls against wind.
Limited, even, to one of the senses,
"things as they are" seemed three worlds at once,
and realism not without magic,
not without mystery.
