Explore "Thetis" by Hilda Doolittle on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
He had asked for immortal life / in the old days and had grown old, / now he had aged apace, / he asked for his youth, / and I, Thetis, granted him freedom under the sea / drip and welter of weeds, / the drift of the fringing grass, / the gift of the never-withering moss, / and the flowering reed, and most, / beauty of fifty nereids, / sisters of nine, / I one of their least, / yet great and a goddess, / granted Pelius, love under the sea, / beauty, grace infinite:
So I crept, at last, / a crescent, a curve of a wave, / (a man would have thought, / had he watched for his nets / on the beach) / a dolphin, a glistening fish, / that burnt and caught for its light, / the light of the undercrest / of the lifting tide, / a fish with silver for breast, / with no light but the light / of the sea it reflects.