On The Difficulty Of Conjuring Up A Dryad

Ravening through the persistent bric-à-brac
 Of blunt pencils, rose-sprigged coffee cup,
 Postage stamps, stacked books' clamor and yawp,
 Neighborhood cockcrow - all nature's prodigal backtalk,
 The vaunting mind
 Snubs impromptu spiels of wind
 And wrestles to impose
 Its own order on what is.
 'With my fantasy alone,' brags the importunate head,
 Arrogant among rook-tongued spaces,
 Sheep greens, finned falls, 'I shall compose a crisis
 To stun sky black out, drive gibbering mad
 Trout, cock, ram,
 That bulk so calm
 On my jealous stare,
 Self-sufficient as they are.'
 But no hocus-pocus of green angels
 Damasks with dazzle the threadbare eye;
 'My trouble, doctor, is: I see a tree,
 And that damn scrupulous tree won't practice wiles
 To beguile sight:
 E.g., by cant of light
 Concoct a Daphne;
 My tree stays tree.
 'However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk
 To my sweet will, no luminous shape
 Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip,
 To hoodwink the honest earth which pointblank
 Spurns such fiction
 As nymphs; cold vision
 Will have no counterfeit
 Palmed off on it.
 'No doubt now in dream-propertied rail some moon-eyed,
 Star-lucky sleight-of-hand man watches
 My jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches,
 And the opulent air go studded with seed,
 While this beggared brain
 Hatches no fortune,
 But from leaf, from grass,
 Thieves what it has.'