[BNP/E3, 49A4 – 69]

What have they done with your beauty,

Bathylus, love, what have they done

With they nude power to tear our hearts from duty

Putting them at our eyes’ task of but seeing

Thy white body’s complete meaning

And thy sweet kisses’ promise in the sun?

What have they done with thee? Where is that Greece

That bore thy loveliness?

All that has passed like passing seas

By the swift ship that under all sails goes

And leaves behind one joy and one distress

And to another joy and distress goes.

Love, my list love, that never wert my love,

Out of Anacreon’s verse thou risest fair

And thy sweet presence is now interwove 

With my modernity’s despair.

My lost love, gone with beauty and delight

Like flowers, flowers of all {…} and hues

[69v]

That fade because they cease to be things seen

In the ancestral coming of the night

And the great shadow final and serene…

23-9-1915

Bathylus.