Is like a song with an accompaniment
Imaginary.

Across the grassy lake,
Across the lake to the shadow of the willows
It is accompanied by an image,
--as by Debussy's
"Reflets dans l'eau."

The swan that is
Reflects
Upon the solitary water--breast to breast
With the duplicity:
"The other one!"

And breast to breast it is confused.
O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession!
It is accompanied by the image of itself
Alone.

At night
The lake is a wide silence,
Without imagination.

But why should poets assume, someone may object, that this mystic
answering of sense to spirit and of spirit to sense is to be discovered
by the imagination of none but poets? All men are made up of flesh and
spirit; do not the desires of all men, accordingly, point to the
spiritual and to the physical, exactly as do the poet's? In a sense;
yes; but on the other hand all men but the poet have an aim that is