ONE morning during Carnival they found two swans in the Public Garden, their long necks twisted, two swans lying splendidly dead under a magnolia not yet in blossom and nobody ever knew why they were killed, whether it was a drunkard, whether an old man tired of women's bodies and wishing thus to destroy a more impeccable beauty, or was he young (over them bends a domino, black with white moons for buttons, while the sky like a domino bends more vastly over). It was a crime of passion; if I have read of other passionate crimes in curtained alcoves, knife or poison, they were less splendid than these two dead swans, O less magnificent than the formal pool, empty without them, this empty pool which stares fixedly into a fixed and empty sky. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...FAREWELL TO LOVE; SONNET by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE EPITAPH ON S.P., A CHILD OF QUEEN ELIZABETH'S CHAPEL by BEN JONSON THE PORTENT by HERMAN MELVILLE ON A VOLUME OF ANONYNOUS POEMS ENTITLED A MASQUE OF POETS by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH FIRST CYCLE OF LOVE POEMS: 5 by GEORGE BARKER ON THE BEACH AT EVENING by HARRY RANDOLPH BLYTHE |