I. The King of Cuckooz
THE King of Cuckooz Contrey 
Hangs peaked above Argier 
With Janzaries and Marabutts 
To bid a sailor fear? 
With lantern-eyed astrologers 
Who walk upon the walls 
And ram with stars their basilisks 
Instead of cannon-balls. 
And in that floating castle 
(I tell you it is so) 
Five thousand naked Concubines 
With dulcimers do go. 
Each rosy nose anoints a tile, 
Bang, bang! the fort salutes, 
When He, the King of Cuckooz Land, 
Comes forth in satin boots, 
Each rosy darling flies before 
When he desires his tent, 
Or, like a tempest driving flowers, 
Inspects a battlement. 
And this I spied by moonlight 
Behind a royal bamboo? 
That Monarch in a curricle 
Which ninety virgins drew; 
That Monarch drinking nectar 
(Lord God, my tale attest!) 
Milked from a snow-white elephant 
As white as your white breast! 
And this is no vain fable 
As other knaves may lie? 
Have I not got that Fowl aboard 
Which no man may deny? 
The King's own hunting-falcon 
I limed across the side 
When by the Bayes of Africa 
King James's Fleet did ride. 
What crest is there emblazoned, 
Whose mark is this, I beg, 
Stamped on the silver manacle 
Around that dainty leg? 
Let this be news to you, my dear, 
How Man should be revered; 
Though I'm no King of Cuckooz Land, 
Behold as fierce a beard! 
I have as huge an appetite, 
As deep a kiss, my girl, 
And somewhere, for the hand that seeks, 
Perhaps a Sultan's pearl! 

. Post-Roads
POST-ROADS that clapped with tympan heels 
Of tilburies and whiskys rapidly spanking, 
Where's now the tireless ghost of Ogilby? 
Post-roads 
That buoyed the rich and plunging springs 
Of coaches vaster than Escurials, 
Where now does Ogilby propel that Wheel, 
What milestones does he pause to reprimand, 
In what unmapped savanna of dumb shades? 
Ye know not?ye are silent?brutish ducts 
Numbed by the bastinadoes of iron boots, 
Three hundred years asnore. Do you forget 
The phaetons and fiacres, flys and breaks, 
The world of dead men staring out of glass 
That drummed upon your bones? Do you forget 
Those nostrils oozing smoke, those floating tails, 
Those criniers whipped with air? 
And kidnapped lights, 
Floats of rubbed yellow towed from window-panes, 
Rushing their lozenges through headlong stones; 
And smells of hackneys, mohair sour with damp, 
Leather and slopped madeira, partridge-pies 
Long-buried under floors; and yawning Fares 
With bumping flap-dark spatulas of cards? 
'Knave takes the ten . . . oh, God, I wish that it, 
I wish that it was Guildford' . . . .
Ogilby 
Did not forget, could not escape such ecstacies, 
Even in the monasteries of mensuration, 
Could not forget the roads that he had gone 
In fog and shining air. Each line was joy, 
Each computation a beatitude, 
A diagram of Ogilby's eye and ear 
With soundings for the nose. Wherefore I think, 
Wherefore I think some English gentleman, 
Some learned doctor of the steak-houses, 
Ending late dinner, having strolled outside 
To quell the frivolous hawthorn, may behold 
There in the moonshine, rolling up an hill, 
Steered by no fleshly hand, with spokes of light, 
The Wheel?John Ogilby's Wheel?the WHEEL hiss by, 
Measuring mileposts of eternity. 

. Dutch Seacoast
No wind of Life may strike within 
This little country's crystal bin, 
Nor calendar compute the days 
Tubed in their capsule of soft glaze. 
Naked and rinsed, the bubble-clear 
Canals of Amsterdam appear, 
The blue-tiled turrets, china clocks 
And glittering beaks of weathercocks. 
A gulf of sweet and winking hoops 
Whereon there ride poops 
With flying mouths and fleeting hair 
Of saints hung up like candles there? 
Fox-coloured mansions, lean and tall, 
That burst in air but never fall 
Whose bolted shadows, row by row, 
Float changeless on the stones below? 
Sky full of ships, bay full of town, 
A port of waters jellied brown: 
Such is the world no tide may stir, 
Sealed by the great cartographer. 
O, could he but clap up like this 
My decomposed metropolis, 
Those other countries of the mind, 
So tousled, dark and undefined! 

. Mermaids
ONCE Mermaids mocked your ships 
With wet and scarlet lips 
And fish-dark difficult hips, Conquistador; 
Then Ondines danced with Sirens on the shore, 
Then from his cloudy stall, you heard the Kraken call, 
And, mad with twisting flame, the Firedrake roar. 
Such old-established Ladies 
No mariner eyed askance, 
But, coming on deck, would swivel his neck 
To watch the darlings dance, 
Or in the gulping dark of nights 
Would cast his tranquil eyes 
On singular kinds of Hermaphrodites 
Without the least surprise. 
Then portu