Help with The Token by F.T. Prince?

[Reala]

Hello everyone,

I've found myself fascinated by the story of F.T. Prince... that said, I've come across a poem by him that reads almost as a riddle and I'm really struggling to decode, despite really liking it (for some reason):

The Token

More beautiful than any gift you gave
You were, a child so beautiful as to seem
To promise ruin what no child can have,
Or woman give. And so a Roman gem
I choose to be your token: here a laurel
Springs to its young height, hangs a broken limb;
And here a group of women wanly quarrel
At a sale of cupids. A hawk looks at them.

I'm wondering if we have any riddle masters out there!

Why does the child promise ruin? What does she not have and what can no woman give? What is the significance of a Roman gem? There are so many questions I'm left with upon finishing this poem that I can't help but love it (despite it going straight over my head!).

Thank you in advance :)

[virtuoso]

It is a conundrum, a maze of paradoxes. I think that the poet was using contradiction as a form of wit. In the first, two lines, he seems to say that the gilded forms of artifice that were presented as gifts (manicured, polished objects) are not as beautiful or comely as a genetically-formed copy of imperfect humanity (child). In lines three & four, the unfathomed beauty promises a ruin that the progenitor, the mom, and the vessel, the child, cannot give or receive. In the last part of line four through line five, a precious gem with a token imitator grow side by side. I think that the broken limb signifies a separation. The perfect child (laurel) outgrows its comely form, innocence, then breaks a limb. What is left is physical and metaphysical ruin. In the last, two lines, women gawk at the artifice (cupids), the perfect objects of imitation that the poet had earlier in the poem deemed less beautiful, less worthy than the natural human child features. Now the poet seems to bear down with hawk eyes on the women who callously are bantering over the comely features/mould of the cupids, while his perfect, organic mold (child) lies in ruins. He now seems to value the in-organic gifts sculpted by artifice. The beauty enshrined in sculpted artifice is far more preferable now than the organic decay of the human child.