I thought of my ‘faculty of poetry'

As of the eye

The bream or white-bait showed

In its hysterical dance of death

When the receding tide

Left it asleep

In a shallow pool on the shore.

Why did I fail to take it?

Was I strangely compassionate

Or merely afraid to touch

The jerking spasm of flesh

With the still eye?

Or was it I on the shore

In the shallow pool, left by the tide,

Engaged in that mystic dance of death,

Twenty years before?