HARDLY ever, now, has a human face
the baffling light or the strange still gleam of the gods
within it, upon it.
Even from the face of the children, now,
that spangled glisten is gone, that at-oneness without after- thought,
and they are bridled with cunning, and bitted
with knowledge of things that shall never be admitted,
even the fact of birth: even little children.
Holbein and Titian and Tintoret could never paint faces, now:
because those faces were windows to the strange horizons, even
Henry VIII.;
whereas faces now are only human grimaces,
with eyes like the interiors of stuffy rooms, furnished.