undarkened

Undarkened, Clay watched X trying to get a cigarette lit.

The loveliest of goddesses replied: ‘Son of Laertes and the gods of old, Odysseus, master mariner and soldier, you shall not stay here longer against your will; but home you may not go unless you take a strange way round and come to the cold homes of Death and pale Persephone. You shall hear prophecy from the rapt shade of blind Teiresias of Thebes, forever charged with reason even among the dead; to him alone, of all the flitting ghosts, Persephone has given a mind undarkened.’

It is for our youth, for the glorious spring and elasticity of our once high-hearted spirit, of our lives so free of care, of our days undarkened by a serious sorrow,—it is for these we mourn, and to our eyes at such moments the spacious street is but a desert, and the splendid monument but a whitened sepulchre!

But gather ye, to whose undarkened eyes                 Night is as day, Leap forth, immortals, Birds of Paradise,                 In bright array, Robed like the shining tresses of the sun,                 And by his name Call from his haunt divine, the ancient one                 Our Father Flame.

Now he was asleep and his face undarkened by thought, one saw how very fair he really was.