The stairs lead to the room as bleak as glass
Where fancy turns the statues.
The empty chairs are dreaming of a protocol,
The tables, of a treaty;
And the world has become a museum.
(The girl is gone,
Fled from the broken altar by the beach,
From the unholy sacrifice when calms became a trade-wind.)
The palaces stare out from their uncurtained trouble,
And windows weep in the weak sun.
The women fear the empty upper rooms
More than the streets as grey as guns
Or the swordlight of the wide unfriendly esplanade.
Thoughts turn to salt among those shrouded chairs
Where, with knives no crueller than pens, or promises,
Took place the painless slaying of the leader’ s daughter.
O, humbler than the truth she bowed her head,
And scarcely seemed, to us, to die.
But after she was killed she fled, alive, like a surprise,
Out of the glass world, to Diana’ s Tauris.
Then wind cheered like a hero in the tackle of the standing ships
And hurled them bravely on the swords and lances of the wintry sea —
While wisdom turned to salt upon the broken piers.
This is the way the ministers have killed the truth,
our daughter,
Steps lead back into the rooms we fear to enter;
Our minds are bleaker than the hall of mirrors:
And the world has become a museum.