Perseus

Borrowed wings on his ankles,

Carrying a stone death.

The hero entered the hall,

All in the hall looked up,

Their breath frozen on them ,

And there was no more shuffle or clatter in the hall at all.

So a friend of a man comes in

And leaves a book he is lending or flowers

And goes again, alive but as good as dead,

And you are left alive, no better than dead,

And you dare not turn the leaden pages of the book or

touch the flowers, the hooded and arrested hours.

Shut your eyes,

There are suns beneath your lids,

Or look in the looking-glass in the end room -

You will find it full of eyes,

The ancient smiles of men cut out with scissors and

kept in mirrors.

Ever to meet me comes, in sun or dull,

The gay hero swinging the Gorgon's head

And I am left, with the dull drumming of the sun,

suspended and dead,

Or the dumb grey-brown of the day is a leper's cloth,

And one feels the earth going round and round the

globe of the blackening mantle, a mad moth.

Louis Macneice, in The Faber Book of Modern Verse, Michael Roberts (ed.), Faber & Faber, 1936 (1ª ed.).