Tulips

An age being mathematical, these flowers Of linear stalks and spheroid blooms were prized By men with wakened, speculative minds,

And when with mathematics they explored The Macrocosm, and came at last to The Vital Spirit of the World, and named it Invisible Pure Fire, or, say, the Light,

The Tulips were the Light's receptacles.

The gold, the bronze, the red, the bright-swart Tulips!

No emblems they for us who no more dream Of mathematics burgeoning to light With Newton's prism and Spinoza's lens,

Or berkeley's ultimate,

Invisible Pure Fire.

In colored state and carven brilliancy We see them now, or, more illumined,

In sudden fieriness, as flowers fit To go with vestments red on Pentecost.