Bad Dreams III

This was my dream: I saw a Forest     Old as the earth, no track nor trace     Of unmade man. Thou, Soul, explorest,     Though in a trembling rapture, space     Immeasurable! Shrubs, turned trees,     Trees that touch heaven, support its frieze     Studded with sun and moon and star:     While, oh, the enormous growths that bar     Mine eye from penetrating past     Their tangled twins where lurks, nay, lives     Royally lone, some brute-type cast     I the rough, time cancels, man forgives.     On, Soul! I saw a lucid City     Of architectural device     Every way perfect. Pause for pity,     Lightning! nor leave a cicatrice     On those bright marbles, dome and spire,     Structures palatial, streets which mire     Dares not defile, paved all too fine     For human footsteps smirch, not thine,     Proud solitary traverser,     My Soul, of silent lengths of way,     With what ecstatic dread, aver,     Lest life start sanctioned by thy stay!     All, but the last sight was the hideous!     A City, yes, a Forest, true,     But each devouring each. Perfidious     Snake-plants had strangled what I knew     Was a pavilion once: each oak     Held on his horns some spoil he broke     By surreptitiously beneath     Upthrusting: pavements, as with teeth,     Griped huge weed widening crack and split     In squares and circles stone-work erst.     Oh, Nature, good! Oh, Art, no whit     Less worthy! Both in one, accurst!