What meaning hath she—Beauty? like the moon
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Casting her magic with indifferent hands
Alike on evil, and alike on good,
Not all our hoarded wisdom understands;
Hinting we know not what, still nothing telling,
Alike in orchards and in charnels dwelling;
Dowering with shapes of glory rose and girl,
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Alike, with feet of pearl,
O'er pits of slime in iridescence dancing,
Making of inward foulness outward fair,
Lending to shapes of hell the morning grace
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Masking pollution with a woman's face,
Hiding, with subtle snare,
The crouching tiger 'neath a woman's hair.
In high cathedrals, where the god-head dwells,
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Staining hushed altar-steps with colours holy
Of painted windows, and with hallowed bells,
Lifting the kneeling spirit to the skies.
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On blossoming gardens and on happy fields,
On breasts of birds and wings of butterflies,
On blood-red sunsets over broken shields,
Her wand of wonder lies.
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No less than quiet dawns and rising moons,
Deck in her splendours, terribly adorn,
Tenderly flame in all her softest hues;
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And corpse-sown battle-fields are hung with dews—
Yea! death she makes as fair as being born.
To Beauty's throne hath named her one with Truth—
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty": holds it good,
Think ye, this guess divine of priestly youth?
Yea! is she not the mystic manual sign
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On all the works of the unknown Divine
That evermore mysteriously He makes—
That evermore mysteriously He loves
All vessels of His making;
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That in His Universe are no mistakes,
Even as some master potter in Cathay
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Fires in his finished masterpiece of clay
His emblem there that he, the master, wrought it,
And answers for his work till Judgment Day
To him who, coming after, shall have bought it;
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Is like the potter's mark, the mystic sign
God placed for man to see
That all his work is one and all divine—
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Yea, Death as Life, and grief as joy, are fair,
And wrong as right, the evil and the good,
All gathered up in one beatitude—
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Beauty! Lo! there and there!