Hadrian's Villa

WHEN the colossus of the will’s dominion
Wavers and shrinks upon a dying eye,
Enormous shadows sit like birds of prey,
Waiting to fall where blistered marbles lie.

But in its open pools the place already
Lay ruined, before the old king left it free.
Shattered in waters of each marble basin,
He might have seen it as today we see.

Dying in discontent, he must have known
How, once mere consciousness had turned its back,
The frescoes of his appetite would crumble,
The fountains of his longing yawn and crack.

And all his genius would become a riddle,
His perfect colonnades at last attain
The incompleteness of a natural thing;
His impulse turn to mystery again.

Who sleeps, and dreams, and wakes, and sleeps again,
May dream again; so in the end we come
Back to the cherished and consuming scene,
As if for once the stones will not be dumb.

We come like dreamers searching for an answer,
Passionately in need to reconstruct
The columned roofs under the blazing sky,
The courts so open, so forever locked.

And some of us, as dreamers, excavate
Under the blanching light of sleep’s high noon,
The artifacts of thought, the site of love,
Whose Hadrian has given the slip, and gone.