Conjectural Domain

If he is he without the royal perception
Is like that question asked by those who gain
Sight that will identify nothing:

And do I clothe him with the eye of lilies
And dress him with the wilderness of nations,
His subtle heart the sea flora

I wreak from voyages through those wiles
The imagination sickly conquers?

Then what herbs control his will
And grassy sleep is his where he is not?
For I’d impel him most impossibly to be

All that he is each instant,
His Protean selves in nuances so jeweled
And Himalayan opposites so met

And subterfuges so exposed in concordance—
Perfection of knowability!—till he is whole
Like angels who shine forth, no dark stain visible.

Desire walketh in darkness like the fool.

For I who study him may know
No more of me than what I must infer
From hooded rat who eats his own father
Or centaur whom I may not know at all
Though virtues of the centaur I may share
Though centaur is not, save celestially,

In mythological geography of dark sphere.
Now who he is I decline to say at all.

For in the darkness the wounded deer feeds
To expel the wound from his hunted breast
And my heart declineth in rage and madness.

Suffer the eye to be understood and the vain sensorium
Proved in its rightness and the body of earth
Proved substantial. Then may I know

For what he is as who I am
And what body of myth makes me fantastical.