magnified to deific, demonic stature

What if all this passion is out of proportion to its subject?
An average beauty, magnified to deific, demonic
stature by the fury of intellect,
a flat-faced girl with slanted eyes and a narrow
waist, and a country lilt to her voice,
that she should infect your day to the very marrow,
to hate the common light and its simple joys?
Where does this sickness come from, because it is
sickness, this conversion of the simplest action
to an ordeal, this hatred of simple delight
in others, of benches in the empty park?
Only her suffering will bring you satisfaction,
old man in the dimming world, only joy is the mark
and silence in the stricken streets where no dogs bark.
I watch them accumulating my errors
steadily repeated as the waves as the sea's
decline, and the shadows on the high terrace
facing Syracuse; cafés flare in the dark.
[Derek Walcott, 'IX' in White Egrets]