水仙，那绿色的花，像枝干上的毛茛——除了它是绿色的和木制的——我来了，我的宝贝，为你歌唱。我们在一起生活了很长时间，如果你愿意的话，我们的生活充满了鲜花。所以当我第一次知道地狱里也有花的时候，我很高兴。今天，我充满了对我们俩都爱过的那些花的逐渐消逝的记忆，甚至对这个可怜的无色的东西——我小时候见过它——活着的人很少珍视它，只有死去的人看到了，他们问自己:我记得什么形状像这东西一样?而我们的眼睛充满了泪水。关于爱，永恒的爱，它会讲述，虽然太弱的一抹深红色，使它完全可信。我有急事要对你说，对你一个人说但这事得等我沉醉于你的到来，也许是最后一次了。于是，我带着内心的恐惧，把它拖了出来，继续说下去，因为我不敢停下来。请听我抓紧时间讲下去。这种情况不会持续太久。 I have forgot and yet I see clearly enough something central to the sky which ranges round it. An odor springs from it! A sweetest odor! Honeysuckle! And now there comes the buzzing of a bee! and a whole flood of sister memories! Only give me time, time to recall them before I shall speak out. Give me time, time. When I was a boy I kept a book to which, from time to time, I added pressed flowers until, after a time, I had a good collection. The asphodel, forebodingly, among them. I bring you, reawakened, a memory of those flowers. They were sweet when I pressed them and retained something of their sweetness a long time. It is a curious odor, a moral odor, that brings me near to you. The color was the first to go. There had come to me a challenge, your dear self, mortal as I was, the lily's throat to the hummingbird! Endless wealth, I thought, held out its arms to me. A thousand tropics in an apple blossom. The generous earth itself gave us lief. The whole world became my garden! But the sea which no one tends is also a garden when the sun strikes it and the waves are wakened. I have seen it and so have you when it puts all flowers to shame. Too, there are the starfish stiffened by the sun and other sea wrack and weeds. We knew that along with the rest of it for we were born by the sea, knew its rose hedges to the very water's brink. There the pink mallow grows and in their season strawberries and there, later, we went to gather the wild plum. I cannot say that I have gone to hell for your love but often found myself there in your pursuit. I do not like it and wanted to be in heaven. Hear me out. Do not turn away. I have learned much in my life from books and out of them about love. Death is not the end of it. There is a hierarchy which can be attained, I think, in its service. Its guerdon is a fairy flower; a cat of twenty lives. If no one came to try it the world would be the loser. It has been for you and me as one who watches a storm come in over the water. We have stood from year to year before the spectacle of our lives with joined hands. The storm unfolds. Lightning plays about the edges of the clouds. The sky to the north is placid, blue in the afterglow as the storm piles up. It is a flower that will soon reach the apex of its bloom. We danced, in our minds, and read a book together. You remember? It was a serious book. And so books entered our lives. The sea! The sea! Always when I think of the sea there comes to mind the Iliad and Helen's public fault that bred it. Were it not for that there would have been no poem but the world if we had remembered, those crimson petals spilled among the stones, would have called it simply murder. The sexual orchid that bloomed then sending so many disinterested men to their graves has left its memory to a race of fools or heroes if silence is a virtue. The sea alone with its multiplicity holds any hope. The storm has proven abortive but we remain after the thoughts it roused to re-cement our lives. It is the mind the mind that must be cured short of death's intervention, and the will becomes again a garden. The poem is complex and the place made in our lives for