And to allay his freezing age,
The poor man takes her in his arms;
The cottage fades before his sight,
The garden and its lovely charms.
The guests are scatter'd thro' the land,
For the eye altering alters all;
The senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat earth becomes a ball;
The stars, sun, moon, all shrink away,
A desert vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or drink,
And a dark desert all around.
The honey of her infant lips,
The bread and wine of her sweet smile,
The wild game of her roving eye,
Does him to infancy beguile;
For as he eats and drinks he grows
Younger and younger every day;
And on the desert wild they both
The Woman’s “beguiling” charms seem to cast a spell over him, but rather than seducing him they cause him, bizarrely, to regress toward infancy.
The Mental Traveller