On a Greek Vase

Divinely shapen cup, thy lip   Unto me seemeth thus to speak: “Behold in me the workmanship,   The grace and cunning of a Greek! “Long ages since he mixed the clay,   Whose sense of symmetry was such, The labor of a single day   Immortal grew beneath his touch. “For dreaming while his fingers went   Around this slender neck of mine, The form of her he loved was blent   With every matchless curve and line. “Her loveliness to me he gave   Who gave unto herself his heart, That love and beauty from the grave   Might rise and live again in art.” And hearing from thy lips this tale   Of love and skill, of art and grace, Thou seem’st to me no more the frail   Memento of an older race: But in thy form divinely wrought   And figured o’er with fret and scroll, I dream, by happy chance was caught,   And dwelleth now, that maiden’s soul.