By dark severance the apparition head Smiles from the air a capital on no Column or a Platonic perhaps head On a canvas sky depending from nothing; Stirs up an old illusion of grandeur By tickling the instinct of heads to be Absolute and to try decapitation And to play truant from the body bush; But too happy and beautiful for those sorts Of head (homekeeping heads are happiest) Discovers maybe thirty unwidowed years Of not dishonoring the faithful stem; Is nameless and has authored for the evil Historian headhunters neither book Nor state and is therefore distinct from tart Heads with crowns and guilty gallery heads; Wherefore the extravagant device of art Unhousing by abstraction this once head Was capital irony by a loving hand That knew the no treason of a head like this; Makes repentance in an unlovely head For having vinegarly traduced the flesh Till, the hurt flesh recusing, the hard egg Is shrunken to its own deathlike surface; And an image thus. The body bears the head (So hardly one they terribly are two) Feeds and obeys and unto please what end? Not to the glory of tyrant head but to The estate of body. Beauty is of body. The flesh contouring shallowly on a head Is a rock-garden needing body's love And best bodiness to colorify The big blue birds sitting and sea-shell cats And caves, and on the iron acropolis To spread the hyacinthine hair and rear The olive garden for the nightingales.