It trembles through her labyrinthine hair
Darkness deepens
Coming out from behind the trees
Up through the fields
Shadows lengthened and joined together
And I thought it looked like water
Coming up through the ground
Rising slowly up and through
Not unlike the sea weaving a path through all in its way
Then ever so slowly, early morning struck the eastern parapet
Infusing its whitewashed rim with an almost electric glow
Rose-coloured, rays descend until they struck him too
Warming as it moved from colour to clarity
Till it begins to progress silverly
Around the western border of the wood
Whence, from a certain spot, its winding flood
Seems at the distance like a crescent moon
The choice of Apollo
The Cephallonian cult
By all the trembling mazes that she ran
Hear us, great Pan!
Most and the least mysterious
Most inexplicable to those who have never been to the island
And the most inevitable to those who know it
Apollo, the god associated with the power of light
Strangers who land here are blinded for two days
This is a light that seems unmediated, either by the air or by the stratosphere
Overwhelming clarity of focus
Heroic strength and brilliance
She exposes these colours
In their original prelapsarian state
As though straight from the imagination of God in his youngest days
When he still believed that all was good
Azure and turquoise, emerald, veridian, and lapis lazuli
The eye of a goat, semi-precious, half way between amber and arylide
The youngest and greenest shoots of grass in the original Eden
Once your eyes have adjusted to the extreme vestal chastity of this light
The light of any other place is miserable and dank by comparison
It is nothing more than something to see by
A disappointment, a blemish
Even her sea is easier to see through than the air of any other place
A man may float in the water watching the distant sea bed
Clearly visible the lubugrious rays, accompanied by diminutive oceanids
The first grey light began gathering faintly
And then as the light built the mountains, they begin to form themselves
Retaining the dark of night in their bulk
The fog that clung to the peaks lifts, and lost are the shapes of the highest most crests
And dissipated in the warmth of the morning
In the pasture the forms of trees remained drawn in dew on the grass beneath them
In the shallows of the bay, where the sea was calm
They do not see the naked sky
Sun pours down like honey saturating everything she touches
Leaving us fancy-sick
My restless spirit never could endure
To brood so long upon one luxury
A shell for Neptune's goblet
She doth soar
So passionately bright, my dazzled soul
Again I looked, and, O ye deities
Who from Olympus watch our destinies
This said, they rose, faint-smiling like stars
Through winter mists, and take their hand
They stept into the boat, and launched from land
