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[1]

Harmonium

[3]

Harmonium

by Wallace Stevens

New York Alfred · A · Knopf Mcmxxiii

[4]

[5]

To
MY WIFE

[7]

The poems in this book, with the exception of The Comedian as the Letter C and a few others, have been published before in Others, Secession, Rogue, The Soil, The Modern School, Broom, Contact, The New Republic, The Measure, The Little Review, The Dial, and particularly in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, of Chicago, edited by Harriet Monroe.

[9]

Earthy Anecdote	15
Invective against Swans	16
In the Carolinas	17
The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage	18
The Plot against the Giant	20
Infanta Marina	21
Domination of Black	22
The Snow Man	24
The Ordinary Women	25
The Load of Sugar-Cane	27
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle	28
Nuances of a Theme by Williams	34
Metaphors of a Magnifico	35
Ploughing on Sunday	36
Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges	37
Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores	39
Fabliau of Florida	40
The Doctor of Geneva	41
Another Weeping Woman	42
Homunculus et la Belle Etoile	43
The Comedian as the Letter C	46
The World without Imagination	47
Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan	50
Approaching Carolina	54
The Idea of a Colony	58
A Nice Shady Home	62
And Daughters with Curls	66
[10] From the Misery of Don Joost	70
O, Florida, Venereal Soil	71
Last Looks at the Lilacs	73
The Worms at Heaven’s Gate	74
The Jack-Rabbit	75
Valley Candle	76
Anecdote of Men by the Thousand	77
The Silver Plough-Boy	78
The Apostrophe to Vincentine	79
Floral Decorations for Bananas	81
Anecdote of Canna	83
Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds	84
Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb	85
Of the Surface of Things	86
Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks	87
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman	89
The Place of the Solitaires	90
The Weeping Burgher	91
The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician	92
Banal Sojourn	93
Depression before Spring	94
The Emperor of Ice-Cream	95
The Cuban Doctor	96
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon	97
Exposition of the Contents of a Cab	98
Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock	99
Sunday Morning	100
The Virgin Carrying a Lantern	105
Stars at Tallapoosa	106
Explanation	107
Six Significant Landscapes	108
Bantams in Pine-Woods	111
Anecdote of the Jar	112
Palace of the Babies	113
[11] Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs	114
Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts underneath the Willow	115
Cortège for Rosenbloom	116
Tattoo	118
The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws	119
Life Is Motion	120
Architecture	121
The Wind Shifts	124
Colloquy with a Polish Aunt	125
Gubbinal	126
Two Figures in Dense Violet Night	127
Theory	128
To the One of Fictive Music	129
Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion	131
Peter Quince at the Clavier	132
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird	135
Nomad Exquisite	138
Tea	139
To the Roaring Wind	140

[13]

Harmonium

[15]

Earthy Anecdote

Every time the bucks went clattering

Over Oklahoma

A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,

They went clattering,

Until they swerved

In a swift, circular line

To the right,

Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved

In a swift, circular line

To the left,

Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.

The firecat went leaping,

To the right, to the left,

And

Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes

And slept.

[16]

Invective against Swans

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks

And far beyond the discords of the wind.

A bronze rain from the sun descending marks

The death of summer, which that time endures

Like one who scrawls a listless testament

Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,

Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon

And giving your bland motions to the air.

Behold, already on the long parades

The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies

Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.

[17]

In the Carolinas

The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.

Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.

Already the new-born children interpret love

In the voices of mothers.

Timeless mother,

How is it that your aspic nipples

For once vent honey?

The pine-tree sweetens my body.

The white iris beautifies me.

[18]

The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

But not on a shell, she starts,

Archaic, for the sea.

But on the first-found weed

She scuds the glitters,

Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent

And would have purple stuff upon her arms,

Tired of the salty harbors,

Eager for the brine and bellowing

Of the high interiors of the sea.

The wind speeds her,

Blowing upon her hands

And watery back.

She touches the clouds, where she goes

In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play

In the scurry and water-shine,

As her heels foam—

Not as when the goldener nude

Of a later day

[19]

Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,

In an intenser calm,

Scullion of fate,

Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,

Upon her irretrievable way.

[20]

The Plot against the Giant

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,

Whetting his hacker,

I shall run before him,

Diffusing the civilest odors

Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.

It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,

Arching cloths besprinkled with colors

As small as fish-eggs.

The threads

Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la ... le pauvre!

I shall run before him,

With a curious puffing.

He will bend his ear then.

I shall whisper

Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

It will undo him.

[21]

Infanta Marina

Her terrace was the sand

And the palms and the twilight.

She made of the motions of her wrist

The grandiose gestures

Of her thought.

The rumpling of the plumes

Of this creature of the evening

Came to be sleights of sails

Over the sea.

And thus she roamed

In the roamings of her fan,

Partaking of the sea,

And of the evening,

As they flowed around

And uttered their subsiding sound.

[22]

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks

Came striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry—the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire,

Turning as the tails of the peacocks

[23]

Turned in the loud fire,

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

[24]

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

[25]

The Ordinary Women

Then from their poverty they rose,

From dry catarrhs, and to guitars

They flitted

Through the palace walls.

They flung monotony behind,

Turned from their want, and, nonchalant,

They crowded

The nocturnal halls.

The lacquered loges huddled there

Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.

The moonlight

Fubbed the girandoles.

And the cold dresses that they wore,

In the vapid haze of the window-bays,

Were tranquil

As they leaned and looked

From the window-sills at the alphabets,

At beta b and gamma g,

To study

The canting curlicues

[26]

Of heaven and of the heavenly script.

And there they read of marriage-bed.

Ti-lill-o!

And they read right long.

The gaunt guitarists on the strings

Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.

The moonlight

Rose on the beachy floors.

How explicit the coiffures became,

The diamond point, the sapphire point,

The sequins

Of the civil fans!

Insinuations of desire,

Puissant speech, alike in each,

Cried quittance

To the wickless halls.

Then from their poverty they rose,

From dry guitars, and to catarrhs

They flitted

Through the palace walls.

[27]

The Load of Sugar-Cane

The going of the glade-boat

Is like water flowing;

Like water flowing

Through the green saw-grass,

Under the rainbows;

Under the rainbows

That are like birds,

Turning, bedizened,

While the wind still whistles

As kildeer do,

When they rise

At the red turban

Of the boatman.

[28]

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

I

“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,

O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,

There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,

Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.”

And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.

Or was it that I mocked myself alone?

I wish that I might be a thinking stone.

The sea of spuming thought foists up again

The radiant bubble that she was. And then

A deep up-pouring from some saltier well

Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

II

A red bird flies across the golden floor.

It is a red bird that seeks out his choir

Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.

A torrent will fall from him when he finds.

Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?

I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;

For it has come that thus I greet the spring.

These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.

No spring can follow past meridian.

Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss

To make believe a starry connaissance.

[29]

III

Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese

Sat tittivating by their mountain pools

Or in the Yangste studied out their beards?

I shall not play the flat historic scale.

You know how Utamaro’s beauties sought

The end of love in their all-speaking braids.

You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.

Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain

That not one curl in nature has survived?

Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,

Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

IV

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life

Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.

When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,

Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.

An apple serves as well as any skull

To be the book in which to read a round,

And is as excellent, in that it is composed

Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.

But it excels in this, that as the fruit

Of love, it is a book too mad to read

Before one merely reads to pass the time.

V

In the high west there burns a furious star.

It is for fiery boys that star was set

And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.

The measure of the intensity of love

[30]

Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.

For me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke

Ticks tediously the time of one more year.

And you? Remember how the crickets came

Out of their mother grass, like little kin,

In the pale nights, when your first imagery

Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.

VI

If men at forty will be painting lakes

The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,

The basic slate, the universal hue.

There is a substance in us that prevails.

But in our amours amorists discern

Such fluctuations that their scrivening

Is breathless to attend each quirky turn.

When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink

Into the compass and curriculum

Of introspective exiles, lecturing.

It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.

VII

The mules that angels ride come slowly down

The blazing passes, from beyond the sun.

Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive.

These muleteers are dainty of their way.

Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat

Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.

This parable, in sense, amounts to this:

The honey of heaven may or may not come,

But that of earth both comes and goes at once.

[31]

Suppose these couriers brought amid their train

A damsel heightened by eternal bloom.

VIII

Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,

An ancient aspect touching a new mind.

It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.

This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Two golden gourds distended on our vines,

We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,

Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,

Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.

The laughing sky will see the two of us

Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

IX

In verses wild with motion, full of din,

Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure

As the deadly thought of men accomplishing

Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate

The faith of forty, ward of Cupido.

Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit

Is not too lusty for your broadening.

I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything

For the music and manner of the paladins

To make oblation fit. Where shall I find

Bravura adequate to this great hymn?

X

The fops of fancy in their poems leave

Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,

[32]

Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.

I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.

I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,

No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.

But, after all, I know a tree that bears

A semblance to the thing I have in mind.

It stands gigantic, with a certain tip

To which all birds come sometime in their time.

But when they go that tip still tips the tree.

XI

If sex were all, then every trembling hand

Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,

That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout

Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth

From madness or delight, without regard

To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!

Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink,

Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,

Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog

Boomed from his very belly odious chords.

XII

A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,

On side-long wing, around and round and round.

A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,

Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I

Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,

In lordly study. Every day, I found

Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.

[33]

Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,

And still pursue, the origin and course

Of love, but until now I never knew

That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

[34]

Nuances of a Theme by Williams

It’s a strange courage

you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise

toward which you lend no part!

I

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,

that reflects neither my face nor any inner part

of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses you in its own light.

Be not chimera of morning,

Half-man, half-star.

Be not an intelligence,

Like a widow’s bird

Or an old horse.

[35]

Metaphors of a Magnifico

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

Into a village,

Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,

Into twenty villages,

Or one man

Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This is old song

That will not declare itself ...

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

Into a village,

Are

Twenty men crossing a bridge

Into a village.

That will not declare itself

Yet is certain as meaning ...

The boots of the men clump

On the boards of the bridge.

The first white wall of the village

Rises through fruit-trees.

Of what was it I was thinking?

So the meaning escapes.

The first white wall of the village ...

The fruit-trees....

[36]

Ploughing on Sunday

The white cock’s tail

Tosses in the wind.

The turkey-cock’s tail

Glitters in the sun.

Water in the fields.

The wind pours down.

The feathers flare

And bluster in the wind.

Remus, blow your horn!

I’m ploughing on Sunday,

Ploughing North America.

Blow your horn!

Tum-ti-tum,

Ti-tum-tum-tum!

The turkey-cock’s tail

Spreads to the sun.

The white cock’s tail

Streams to the moon.

Water in the fields.

The wind pours down.

[37]

Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges

Ursula, in a garden, found

A bed of radishes.

She kneeled upon the ground

And gathered them,

With flowers around,

Blue, gold, pink, and green.

She dressed in red and gold brocade

And in the grass an offering made

Of radishes and flowers.

She said, “My dear,

Upon your altars,

I have placed

The marguerite and coquelicot,

And roses

Frail as April snow;

But here,” she said,

“Where none can see,

I make an offering, in the grass,

Of radishes and flowers.”

And then she wept

For fear the Lord would not accept.

[38]

The good Lord in His garden sought

New leaf and shadowy tinct,

And they were all His thought.

He heard her low accord,

Half prayer and half ditty,

And He felt a subtle quiver,

That was not heavenly love,

Or pity.

This is not writ

In any book.

[39]

Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores

I say now, Fernando, that on that day

The mind roamed as a moth roams,

Among the blooms beyond the open sand;

And that whatever noise the motion of the waves

Made on the sea-weeds and the covered stones

Disturbed not even the most idle ear.

Then it was that that monstered moth

Which had lain folded against the blue

And the colored purple of the lazy sea,

And which had drowsed along the bony shores,

Shut to the blather that the water made,

Rose up besprent and sought the flaming red

Dabbled with yellow pollen—red as red

As the flag above the old café—

And roamed there all the stupid afternoon.

[40]

Fabliau of Florida

Barque of phosphor

On the palmy beach,

Move outward into heaven,

Into the alabasters

And night blues.

Foam and cloud are one.

Sultry moon-monsters

Are dissolving.

Fill your black hull

With white moonlight.

There will never be an end

To this droning of the surf.

[41]

The Doctor of Geneva

The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand

That lay impounding the Pacific swell,

Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.

Lacustrine man had never been assailed

By such long-rolling opulent cataracts,

Unless Racine or Bossuet held the like.

He did not quail. A man so used to plumb

The multifarious heavens felt no awe

Before these visible, voluble delugings,

Which yet found means to set his simmering mind

Spinning and hissing with oracular

Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste,

Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang

In an unburgherly apocalypse.

The doctor used his handkerchief and sighed.

[42]

Another Weeping Woman

Pour the unhappiness out

From your too bitter heart,

Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.

It is in the water of tears

Its black blooms rise.

The magnificent cause of being,

The imagination, the one reality

In this imagined world

Leaves you

With him for whom no phantasy moves,

And you are pierced by a death.

[43]

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile

In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks

The young emerald, evening star,

Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,

And ladies soon to be married.

By this light the salty fishes

Arch in the sea like tree-branches,

Going in many directions

Up and down.

This light conducts

The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings

Of widows and trembling ladies,

The movements of fishes.

How pleasant an existence it is

That this emerald charms philosophers,

Until they become thoughtlessly willing

To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,

Knowing that they can bring back thought

In the night that is still to be silent,

Reflecting this thing and that,

Before they sleep!

[44]

It is better that, as scholars,

They should think hard in the dark cuffs

Of voluminous cloaks,

And shave their heads and bodies.

It might well be that their mistress

Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.

She might, after all, be a wanton,

Abundantly beautiful, eager,

Fecund,

From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,

The innermost good of their seeking

Might come in the simplest of speech.

It is a good light, then, for those

That know the ultimate Plato,

Tranquillizing with this jewel

The torments of confusion.

[45]

The Comedian as the Letter C

[47]

I
The World without Imagination

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,

The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates

Of snails, musician of pears, principium

And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig

Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,

Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea

Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.

An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,

Berries of villages, a barber’s eye,

An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,

Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung

On porpoises, instead of apricots,

And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts

Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,

Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.

One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha.

It was not so much the lost terrestrial,

The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,

That century of wind in a single puff.

What counted was mythology of self,

Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,

The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,

The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak

[48]

Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw

Of hum, inquisitorial botanist,

And general lexicographer of mute

And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,

A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.

What word split up in clickering syllables

And storming under multitudinous tones

Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?

Crispin was washed away by magnitude.

The whole of life that still remained in him

Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,

Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,

Polyphony beyond his baton’s thrust.

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,

The old age of a watery realist,

Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes

Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age

That whispered to the sun’s compassion, made

A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,

And on the clopping foot-ways of the moon

Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that

Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,

Except in faint, memorial gesturings,

That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,

Here, something in the rise and fall of wind

That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,

A sunken voice, both of remembering

And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.

Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.

The valet in the tempest was annulled.

Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,

And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.

Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales,

[49]

Dejected his manner to the turbulence.

The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,

The dead brine melted in him like a dew

Of winter, until nothing of himself

Remained, except some starker, barer self

In a starker, barer world, in which the sun

Was not the sun because it never shone

With bland complaisance on pale parasols,

Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.

Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried

Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin

Became an introspective voyager.

Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,

Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,

But with a speech belched out of hoary darks

Noway resembling his, a visible thing,

And excepting negligible Triton, free

From the unavoidable shadow of himself

That lay elsewhere around him. Severance

Was clear. The last distortion of romance

Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea

Severs not only lands but also selves.

Here was no help before reality.

Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.

The imagination, here, could not evade,

In poems of plums, the strict austerity

Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.

The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.

What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?

Out of what swift destruction did it spring?

It was caparison of wind and cloud

And something given to make whole among

The ruses that were shattered by the large.

[50]

II
Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers

Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,

In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan

And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,

As if raspberry tanagers in palms,

High up in orange air, were barbarous.

But Crispin was too destitute to find

In any commonplace the sought-for aid.

He was a man made vivid by the sea,

A man come out of luminous traversing,

Much trumpeted, made desperately clear,

Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies,

To whom oracular rockings gave no rest.

Into a savage color he went on.

How greatly had he grown in his demesne,

This auditor of insects! He that saw

The stride of vanishing autumn in a park

By way of decorous melancholy; he

That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,

As dissertation of profound delight,

Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes,

Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged

His apprehension, made him intricate

[51]

In moody rucks, and difficult and strange

In all desires, his destitution’s mark.

He was in this as other freemen are,

Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.

His violence was for aggrandizement

And not for stupor, such as music makes

For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived

That coolness for his heat came suddenly,

And only, in the fables that he scrawled

With his own quill, in its indigenous dew,

Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,

Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,

Green barbarism turning paradigm.

Crispin foresaw a curious promenade

Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,

And elemental potencies and pangs,

And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,

Making the most of savagery of palms,

Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom

That yuccas breed, and of the panther’s tread.

The fabulous and its intrinsic verse

Came like two spirits parleying, adorned

In radiance from the Atlantic coign,

For Crispin and his quill to catechize.

But they came parleying of such an earth,

So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,

So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled

Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,

Scenting the jungle in their refuges,

So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red

In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,

That earth was like a jostling festival

Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,

Expanding in the gold’s maternal warmth.

[52]

So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found

A new reality in parrot-squawks.

Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd

Discoverer walked through the harbor streets

Inspecting the cabildo, the façade

Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard

A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed,

Approaching like a gasconade of drums.

The white cabildo darkened, the façade,

As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up

In swift, successive shadows, dolefully.

The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind,

Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,

Came bluntly thundering, more terrible

Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

Gesticulating lightning, mystical,

Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight.

An annotator has his scruples, too.

He knelt in the cathedral with the rest,

This connoisseur of elemental fate,

Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one

Of many proclamations of the kind,

Proclaiming something harsher than he learned

From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights

Or seeing the midsummer artifice

Of heat upon his pane. This was the span

Of force, the quintessential fact, the note

Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,

The thing that makes him envious in phrase.

And while the torrent on the roof still droned

He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free

And more than free, elate, intent, profound

[53]

And studious of a self possessing him,

That was not in him in the crusty town

From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay

The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,

In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,

Let down gigantic quavers of its voice,

For Crispin to vociferate again.

[54]

III
Approaching Carolina

The book of moonlight is not written yet

Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room

For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,

Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage

Through sweating changes, never could forget

That wakefulness or meditating sleep,

In which the sulky strophes willingly

Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.

Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book

For the legendary moonlight that once burned

In Crispin’s mind above a continent.

America was always north to him,

A northern west or western north, but north,

And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled

And lank, rising and slumping from a sea

Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread

In endless ledges, glittering, submerged

And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.

The spring came there in clinking pannicles

Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,

If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,

Before the winter’s vacancy returned.

The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,

Was like a glacial pink upon the air.

[55]

The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice

Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,

Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

How many poems he denied himself

In his observant progress, lesser things

Than the relentless contact he desired;

How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds

He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,

Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;

And what descants, he sent to banishment!

Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave

The liaison, the blissful liaison,

Between himself and his environment,

Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,

For him, and not for him alone. It seemed

Illusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,

Wrong as a divagation to Peking,

To him that postulated as his theme

The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,

A passionately niggling nightingale.

Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,

A minor meeting, facile, delicate.

Thus he conceived his voyaging to be

An up and down between two elements,

A fluctuating between sun and moon,

A sally into gold and crimson forms,

As on this voyage, out of goblinry,

And then retirement like a turning back

And sinking down to the indulgences

That in the moonlight have their habitude.

But let these backward lapses, if they would,

Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew

[56]

It was a flourishing tropic he required

For his refreshment, an abundant zone,

Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious

Yet with a harmony not rarefied

Nor fined for the inhibited instruments

Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed

Between a Carolina of old time,

A little juvenile, an ancient whim,

And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn

From what he saw across his vessel’s prow.

He came. The poetic hero without palms

Or jugglery, without regalia.

And as he came he saw that it was spring,

A time abhorrent to the nihilist

Or searcher for the fecund minimum.

The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,

Although contending featly in its veils,

Irised in dew and early fragrancies,

Was gemmy marionette to him that sought

A sinewy nakedness. A river bore

The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,

He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells

Of dampened lumber, emanations blown

From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,

Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks

That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.

He savored rankness like a sensualist.

He marked the marshy ground around the dock,

The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,

Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore.

It purified. It made him see how much

Of what he saw he never saw at all.

[57]

He gripped more closely the essential prose

As being, in a world so falsified,

The one integrity for him, the one

Discovery still possible to make,

To which all poems were incident, unless

That prose should wear a poem’s guise at last.

[58]

IV
The Idea of a Colony

Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence.

That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find.

Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare

His cloudy drift and planned a colony.

Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,

Rex and principium, exit the whole

Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose

More exquisite than any tumbling verse:

A still new continent in which to dwell.

What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,

Whatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind,

If not, when all is said, to drive away

The shadow of his fellows from the skies,

And, from their stale intelligence released,

To make a new intelligence prevail?

Hence the reverberations in the words

Of his first central hymns, the celebrants

Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength

Of his aesthetic, his philosophy,

The more invidious, the more desired.

The florist asking aid from cabbages,

The rich man going bare, the paladin

Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,

The appointed power unwielded from disdain.

[59]

His western voyage ended and began.

The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,

Another, still more bellicose, came on.

He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,

And, being full of the caprice, inscribed

Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.

He made a singular collation. Thus:

The natives of the rain are rainy men.

Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,

And April hillsides wooded white and pink,

Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white

And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.

And in their music showering sounds intone.

On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,

What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,

What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,

That streaking gold should speak in him

Or bask within his images and words?

If these rude instances impeach themselves

By force of rudeness, let the principle

Be plain. For application Crispin strove,

Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute

As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.

Upon these premises propounding, he

Projected a colony that should extend

To the dusk of a whistling south below the south,

A comprehensive island hemisphere.

The man in Georgia waking among pines

Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,

Planting his pristine cores in Florida,

Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,

But on the banjo’s categorical gut,

[60]

Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays.

Sepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal,

Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,

Should make the intricate Sierra scan.

And dark Brazilians in their cafés,

Musing immaculate, pampean dits,

Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,

To be their latest, lucent paramour.

These are the broadest instances. Crispin,

Progenitor of such extensive scope,

Was not indifferent to smart detail.

The melon should have apposite ritual,

Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,

When its black branches came to bud, belle day,

Should have an incantation. And again,

When piled on salvers its aroma steeped

The summer, it should have a sacrament

And celebration. Shrewd novitiates

Should be the clerks of our experience.

These bland excursions into time to come,

Related in romance to backward flights,

However prodigal, however proud,

Contained in their afflatus the reproach

That first drove Crispin to his wandering.

He could not be content with counterfeit,

With masquerade of thought, with hapless words

That must belie the racking masquerade,

With fictive flourishes that preordained

His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree

Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash

Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.

It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,

[61]

Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served

Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,

A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.

There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams

That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs

Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not

The oncoming fantasies of better birth.

The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed

Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.

All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.

But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,

With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?

No, no: veracious page on page, exact.

[62]

V
A Nice Shady Home

Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,

Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent

Had kept him still the pricking realist,

Choosing his element from droll confect

Of was and is and shall or ought to be,

Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far

Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come

To colonize his polar planterdom

And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.

But his emprize to that idea soon sped.

Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there

Slid from his continent by slow recess

To things within his actual eye, alert

To the difficulty of rebellious thought

When the sky is blue. The blue infected will.

It may be that the yarrow in his fields

Sealed pensive purple under its concern.

But day by day, now this thing and now that

Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned,

Little by little, as if the suzerain soil

Abashed him by carouse to humble yet

Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement.

He first, as realist, admitted that

Whoever hunts a matinal continent

[63]

May, after all, stop short before a plum

And be content and still be realist.

The words of things entangle and confuse.

The plum survives its poems. It may hang

In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground

Obliquities of those who pass beneath,

Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved

In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,

Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.

So Crispin hasped on the surviving form,

For him, of shall or ought to be in is.

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass

Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?

Was he to company vastest things defunct

With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?

Scrawl a tragedian’s testament? Prolong

His active force in an inactive dirge,

Which, let the tall musicians call and call,

Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen

Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?

Because he built a cabin who once planned

Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?

Because he turned to salad-beds again?

Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?

Should he lay by the personal and make

Of his own fate an instance of all fate?

What is one man among so many men?

What are so many men in such a world?

Can one man think one thing and think it long?

Can one man be one thing and be it long?

The very man despising honest quilts

Lies quilted to his poll in his despite.

For realists, what is is what should be.

[64]

And so it came, his cabin shuffled up,

His trees were planted, his duenna brought

Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,

The curtains flittered and the door was closed.

Crispin, magister of a single room,

Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down

It was as if the solitude concealed

And covered him and his congenial sleep.

So deep a sound fell down it grew to be

A long soothsaying silence down and down.

The crickets beat their tambours in the wind,

Marching a motionless march, custodians.

In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,

Each day, still curious, but in a round

Less prickly and much more condign than that

He once thought necessary. Like Candide,

Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,

And cream for the fig and silver for the cream,

A blonde to tip the silver and to taste

The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be

Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries!

Yet the quotidian saps philosophers

And men like Crispin like them in intent,

If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.

But the quotidian composed as his,

Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,

The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,

Although the rose was not the noble thorn

Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,

Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung

Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights

In which those frail custodians watched,

Indifferent to the tepid summer cold,

[65]

While he poured out upon the lips of her

That lay beside him, the quotidian

Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.

For all it takes it gives a humped return

Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.

[66]

VI
And Daughters with Curls

Portentous enunciation, syllable

To blessed syllable affined, and sound

Bubbling felicity in cantilene,

Prolific and tormenting tenderness

Of music, as it comes to unison,

Forgather and bell boldly Crispin’s last

Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur

His grand pronunciamento and devise.

The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,

Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,

Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,

Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.

The return to social nature, once begun,

Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,

Involved him in midwifery so dense

His cabin counted as philactary,

Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt

Of children nibbling at the sugared void,

Infants yet eminently old, then dome

And halidom for the unbraided femes,

Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,

Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,

True daughters both of Crispin and his clay.

[67]

All this with many mulctings of the man,

Effective colonizer sharply stopped

In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.

But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs

Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints

Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex

The stopper to indulgent fatalist

Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon

His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,

She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,

So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,

Attentive to a coronal of things

Secret and singular. Second, upon

A second similar counterpart, a maid

Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake

Excepting to the motherly footstep, but

Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.

Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,

A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,

Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,

All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.

A few years more and the vermeil capuchin

Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,

The dulcet omen fit for such a house.

The second sister dallying was shy

To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself

Out of her botches, hot embosomer.

The third one gaping at the orioles

Lettered herself demurely as became

A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.

The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.

Four daughters in a world too intricate

In the beginning, four blithe instruments

Of differing struts, four voices several

[68]

In couch, four more personæ, intimate

As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue

That should be silver, four accustomed seeds

Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights

That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,

Four questioners and four sure answerers.

Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.

The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,

Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out

Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,

And sown again by the stiffest realist,

Came reproduced in purple, family font,

The same insoluble lump. The fatalist

Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,

Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote

Invented for its pith, not doctrinal

In form though in design, as Crispin willed,

Disguised pronunciamento, summary,

Autumn’s compendium, strident in itself

But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved

In those portentous accents, syllables,

And sounds of music coming to accord

Upon his law, like their inherent sphere,

Seraphic proclamations of the pure

Delivered with a deluging onwardness.

Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote

Is false, if Crispin is a profitless

Philosopher, beginning with green brag,

Concluding fadedly, if as a man

Prone to distemper he abates in taste,

Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,

Glozing his life with after-shining flicks,

Illuminating, from a fancy gorged

[69]

By apparition, plain and common things,

Sequestering the fluster from the year,

Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,

And so distorting, proving what he proves

Is nothing, what can all this matter since

The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

So may the relation of each man be clipped.

[70]

From the Misery of Don Joost

I have finished my combat with the sun;

And my body, the old animal,

Knows nothing more.

The powerful seasons bred and killed,

And were themselves the genii

Of their own ends.

Oh, but the very self of the storm

Of sun and slaves, breeding and death,

The old animal,

The senses and feeling, the very sound

And sight, and all there was of the storm,

Knows nothing more.

[71]

O, Florida, Venereal Soil

A few things for themselves,

Convolvulus and coral,

Buzzards and live-moss,

Tiestas from the keys,

A few things for themselves,

Florida, venereal soil,

Disclose to the lover.

The dreadful sundry of this world,

The Cuban, Polodowsky,

The Mexican women,

The negro undertaker

Killing the time between corpses

Fishing for crayfish ...

Virgin of boorish births,

Swiftly in the nights,

In the porches of Key West,

Behind the bougainvilleas,

After the guitar is asleep,

Lasciviously as the wind,

You come tormenting,

Insatiable,

When you might sit,

A scholar of darkness,

[72]

Sequestered over the sea,

Wearing a clear tiara

Of red and blue and red,

Sparkling, solitary, still,

In the high sea-shadow.

Donna, donna, dark,

Stooping in indigo gown

And cloudy constellations,

Conceal yourself or disclose

Fewest things to the lover—

A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,

A pungent bloom against your shade.

[73]

Last Looks at the Lilacs

To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,

O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks

And tell the divine ingénue, your companion,

That this bloom is the bloom of soap

And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

Do you suppose that she cares a tick,

In this hymeneal air, what it is

That marries her innocence thus,

So that her nakedness is near,

Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

Poor buffo! Look at the lavender

And look your last and look still steadily,

And say how it comes that you see

Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel

Her body quivering in the Floréal

Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,

Prime paramour and belted paragon,

Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,

Patron and imager of the gold Don John,

Who will embrace her before summer comes.

[74]

The Worms at Heaven’s Gate

Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,

Within our bellies, we her chariot.

Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,

The lashes of that eye and its white lid.

Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,

And, finger after finger, here, the hand,

The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,

The bundle of the body and the feet.

Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

[75]

The Jack-Rabbit

In the morning,

The jack-rabbit sang to the Arkansaw.

He carolled in caracoles

On the feat sandbars.

The black man said,

“Now, grandmother,

Crochet me this buzzard

On your winding-sheet,

And do not forget his wry neck

After the winter.”

The black man said,

“Look out, O caroller,

The entrails of the buzzard

Are rattling.”

[76]

Valley Candle

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.

Beams of the huge night converged upon it,

Until the wind blew.

Then beams of the huge night

Converged upon its image,

Until the wind blew.

[77]

Anecdote of Men by the Thousand

The soul, he said, is composed

Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,

Who are the East.

There are men of a province

Who are that province

There are men of a valley

Who are that valley.

There are men whose words

Are as natural sounds

Of their places

As the cackle of toucans

In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument

Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?

Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,

In its place,

Is an invisible element of that place

Made visible.

[78]

The Silver Plough-Boy

A black figure dances in a black field.

It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread there by some wash-woman for the night.

It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure is silver.

It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy plough, the green blades following.

How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black figure slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the sheet falls to the ground!

[79]

The Apostrophe to Vincentine

I

I figured you as nude between

Monotonous earth and dark blue sky.

It made you seem so small and lean

And nameless,

Heavenly Vincentine.

II

I saw you then, as warm as flesh,

Brunette,

But yet not too brunette,

As warm, as clean.

Your dress was green,

Was whited green,

Green Vincentine.

III

Then you came walking,

In a group

Of human others,

Voluble.

Yes: you came walking,

Vincentine.

Yes: you came talking.

[80]

IV

And what I knew you felt

Came then.

Monotonous earth I saw become

Illimitable spheres of you,

And that white animal, so lean,

Turned Vincentine,

Turned heavenly Vincentine,

And that white animal, so lean,

Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.

[81]

Floral Decorations for Bananas

Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do.

These insolent, linear peels

And sullen, hurricane shapes

Won’t do with your eglantine.

They require something serpentine.

Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight,

In an eighteenth-century dish,

And pettifogging buds,

For the women of primrose and purl,

Each one in her decent curl.

Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched ...

The table was set by an ogre,

His eye on an outdoor gloom

And a stiff and noxious place.

Pile the bananas on planks.

The women will be all shanks

And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves

Plucked from the Carib trees,

Fibrous and dangling down,

[82]

Oozing cantankerous gum

Out of their purple maws,

Darting out of their purple craws

Their musky and tingling tongues.

[83]

Anecdote of Canna

Huge are the canna in the dreams of

X, the mighty thought, the mighty man.

They fill the terrace of his capitol.

His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes

In sleep may never meet another thought

Or thing.... Now day-break comes....

X promenades the dewy stones,

Observes the canna with a clinging eye,

Observes and then continues to observe.

[84]

Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,

Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,

Eliciting the still sustaining pomps

Of speech which are like music so profound

They seem an exaltation without sound.

Funest philosophers and ponderers,

Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

So speech of your processionals returns

In the casual evocations of your tread

Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These

Are the music of meet resignation; these

The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you

To magnify, if in that drifting waste

You are to be accompanied by more

Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

[85]

Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb

What word have you, interpreters, of men

Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,

The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?

Do they believe they range the gusty cold,

With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,

Freemen of death, about and still about

To find whatever it is they seek? Or does

That burial, pillared up each day as porte

And spiritous passage into nothingness,

Foretell each night the one abysmal night,

When the host shall no more wander, nor the light

Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?

Make hue among the dark comedians,

Halloo them in the topmost distances

For answer from their icy Elysée.

[86]

Of the Surface of Things

I

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

II

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,

Reading where I have written,

“The spring is like a belle undressing.”

III

The gold tree is blue.

The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.

The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

[87]

Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

In the moonlight

I met Berserk,

In the moonlight

On the bushy plain.

Oh, sharp he was

As the sleepless!

And, “Why are you red

In this milky blue?”

I said.

“Why sun-colored,

As if awake

In the midst of sleep?”

“You that wander,”

So he said,

“On the bushy plain,

Forget so soon.

But I set my traps

In the midst of dreams.”

I knew from this

That the blue ground

Was full of blocks

And blocking steel.

I knew the dread

Of the bushy plain,

[88]

And the beauty

Of the moonlight

Falling there,

Falling

As sleep falls

In the innocent air.

[89]

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Take the moral law and make a nave of it

And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,

The conscience is converted into palms,

Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.

We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take

The opposing law and make a peristyle,

And from the peristyle project a masque

Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,

Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,

Is equally converted into palms,

Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,

Madame, we are where we began. Allow,

Therefore, that in the planetary scene

Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,

Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,

Proud of such novelties of the sublime,

Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,

May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves

A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.

This will make widows wince. But fictive things

Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

[90]

The Place of the Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires

Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea

On the dark, green water-wheel,

Or on the beaches,

There must be no cessation

Of motion, or of the noise of motion,

The renewal of noise

And manifold continuation;

And, most, of the motion of thought

And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,

Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

[91]

The Weeping Burgher

It is with a strange malice

That I distort the world.

Ah! that ill humors

Should mask as white girls.

And ah! that Scaramouche

Should have a black barouche.

The sorry verities!

Yet in excess, continual,

There is cure of sorrow.

Permit that if as ghost I come

Among the people burning in me still,

I come as belle design

Of foppish line.

And I, then, tortured for old speech,

A white of wildly woven rings;

I, weeping in a calcined heart,

My hands such sharp, imagined things.

[92]

The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician

It comes about that the drifting of these curtains

Is full of long motions; as the ponderous

Deflations of distance; or as clouds

Inseparable from their afternoons;

Or the changing of light, the dropping

Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude

Of night, in which all motion

Is beyond us, as the firmament,

Up-rising and down-falling, bares

The last largeness, bold to see.

[93]

Banal Sojourn

Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.

The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.

The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.

Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.

Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,

Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries,

“That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons,

When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness.

And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land.

For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?

And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox?

One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.

[94]

Depression before Spring

The cock crows

But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde

Is dazzling,

As the spittle of cows

Threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!

But ki-ki-ri-ki

Brings no rou-cou,

No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes

In slipper green.

[95]

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

[96]

The Cuban Doctor

I went to Egypt to escape

The Indian, but the Indian struck

Out of his cloud and from his sky.

This was no worm bred in the moon,

Wriggling far down the phantom air,

And on a comfortable sofa dreamed.

The Indian struck and disappeared.

I knew my enemy was near—I,

Drowsing in summer’s sleepiest horn.

[97]

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended

The western day through what you called

The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

[98]

Exposition of the Contents of a Cab

Victoria Clementina, negress,

Took seven white dogs

To ride in a cab.

Bells of the dogs chinked.

Harness of the horses shuffled

Like brazen shells.

Oh-hé-hé! Fragrant puppets

By the green lake-pallors,

She too is flesh,

And a breech-cloth might wear,

Netted of topaz and ruby

And savage blooms;

Thridding the squawkiest jungle

In a golden sedan,

White dogs at bay.

What breech-cloth might you wear,

Except linen, embroidered

By elderly women?

[99]

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

[100]

Sunday Morning

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark

Encroachment of that old catastrophe,

As a calm darkens among water-lights.

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings

Seem things in some procession of the dead,

Winding across wide water, without sound.

The day is like wide water, without sound,

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet

Over the seas, to silent Palestine,

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

[101]

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave

Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.

He moved among us, as a muttering king,

Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

Until our blood, commingling, virginal,

With heaven, brought such requital to desire

The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

The sky will be much friendlier then than now,

A part of labor and a part of pain,

And next in glory to enduring love,

Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

[102]

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”

There is not any haunt of prophesy,

Nor any old chimera of the grave,

Neither the golden underground, nor isle

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,

Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured

As April’s green endures; or will endure

Like her remembrance of awakened birds,

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped

By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

V

She says, “But in contentment I still feel

The need of some imperishable bliss.”

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

[103]

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find, the same receding shores

That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Why set the pear upon those river-banks

Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?

Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

The silken weavings of our afternoons,

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

Their boisterous devotion to the sun,

Not as a god, but as a god might be,

Naked among them, like a savage source.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,

That choir among themselves long afterward.

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship

Of men that perish and of summer morn.

And whence they came and whither they shall go

The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,

A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine

[104]

Is not the porch of spirits lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

[105]

The Virgin Carrying a Lantern

There are no bears among the roses,

Only a negress who supposes

Things false and wrong

About the lantern of the beauty

Who walks, there, as a farewell duty,

Walks long and long.

The pity that her pious egress

Should fill the vigil of a negress

With heat so strong!

[106]

Stars at Tallapoosa

The lines are straight and swift between the stars.

The night is not the cradle that they cry,

The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.

The lines are much too dark and much too sharp.

The mind herein attains simplicity,

There is no moon, no single, silvered leaf.

The body is no body to be seen

But is an eye that studies its black lid.

Let these be your delight, secretive hunter,

Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever-mingling,

Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic.

These lines are swift and fall without diverging.

The melon-flower nor dew nor web of either

Is like to these. But in yourself is like:

A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight,

Flying and falling straightway for their pleasure,

Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold;

Or, if not arrows, then the nimblest motions,

Making recoveries of young nakedness

And the lost vehemence the midnights hold.

[107]

Explanation

Ach, Mutter,

This old, black dress,

I have been embroidering

French flowers on it.

Not by way of romance,

Here is nothing of the ideal,

Nein,

Nein.

It would have been different,

Liebchen,

If I had imagined myself,

In an orange gown,

Drifting through space,

Like a figure on the church-wall.

[108]

Six Significant Landscapes

I

An old man sits

In the shadow of a pine tree

In China.

He sees larkspur,

Blue and white,

At the edge of the shadow,

Move in the wind.

His beard moves in the wind.

The pine tree moves in the wind.

Thus water flows

Over weeds.

II

The night is of the color

Of a woman’s arm:

Night, the female,

Obscure,

Fragrant and supple,

Conceals herself.

A pool shines,

Like a bracelet

Shaken in a dance.

[109]

III

I measure myself

Against a tall tree.

I find that I am much taller,

For I reach right up to the sun,

With my eye;

And I reach to the shore of the sea

With my ear.

Nevertheless, I dislike

The way the ants crawl

In and out of my shadow.

IV

When my dream was near the moon,

The white folds of its gown

Filled with yellow light.

The soles of its feet

Grew red.

Its hair filled

With certain blue crystallizations

From stars,

Not far off.

V

Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,

Nor the chisels of the long streets,

Nor the mallets of the domes

And high towers,

Can carve

What one star can carve,

Shining through the grape-leaves.

[110]

VI

Rationalists, wearing square hats,

Think, in square rooms,

Looking at the floor,

Looking at the ceiling.

They confine themselves

To right-angled triangles.

If they tried rhomboids,

Cones, waving lines, ellipses—

As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—

Rationalists would wear sombreros.

[111]

Bantams in Pine-Woods

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun

Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.

Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!

Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,

And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

[112]

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

[113]

Palace of the Babies

The disbeliever walked the moonlit place,

Outside of gates of hammered serafin,

Observing the moon-blotches on the walls.

The yellow rocked across the still façades,

Or else sat spinning on the pinnacles,

While he imagined humming sounds and sleep.

The walker in the moonlight walked alone,

And each blank window of the building balked

His loneliness and what was in his mind:

If in a shimmering room the babies came,

Drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing,

It was because night nursed them in its fold.

Night nursed not him in whose dark mind

The clambering wings of birds of black revolved,

Making harsh torment of the solitude.

The walker in the moonlight walked alone,

And in his heart his disbelief lay cold.

His broad-brimmed hat came close upon his eyes.

[114]

Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs

It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,

Tugging at banks, until they seemed

Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,

The breath of turgid summer, and

Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted

This field, and tended it awhile,

Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,

Grotesque with this nosing in banks,

This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,

As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves

While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.

[115]

Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow

My titillations have no foot-notes

And their memorials are the phrases

Of idiosyncratic music.

The love that will not be transported

In an old, frizzled, flambeaued manner,

But muses on its eccentricity,

Is like a vivid apprehension

Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster,

Or paper souvenirs of rapture,

Of bliss submerged beneath appearance,

In an interior ocean’s rocking

Of long, capricious fugues and chorals.

[116]

Cortège for Rosenbloom

Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead

And his finical carriers tread,

On a hundred legs, the tread

Of the dead.

Rosenbloom is dead.

They carry the wizened one

Of the color of horn

To the sullen hill,

Treading a tread

In unison for the dead.

Rosenbloom is dead.

The tread of the carriers does not halt

On the hill, but turns

Up the sky.

They are bearing his body into the sky.

It is the infants of misanthropes

And the infants of nothingness

That tread

The wooden ascents

Of the ascending of the dead.

It is turbans they wear

And boots of fur

[117]

As they tread the boards

In a region of frost,

Viewing the frost.

To a chirr of gongs

And a chitter of cries

And the heavy thrum

Of the endless tread

That they tread.

To a jangle of doom

And a jumble of words

Of the intense poem

Of the strictest prose

Of Rosenbloom.

And they bury him there,

Body and soul,

In a place in the sky.

The lamentable tread!

Rosenbloom is dead.

[118]

Tattoo

The light is like a spider.

It crawls over the water.

It crawls over the edges of the snow.

It crawls under your eyelids

And spreads its webs there—

Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes

Are fastened

To the flesh and bones of you

As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes

On the surface of the water

And in the edges of the snow.

[119]

The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws

Above the forest of the parakeets,

A parakeet of parakeets prevails,

A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

(The rudiments of tropics are around,

Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)

His lids are white because his eyes are blind.

He is not paradise of parakeets,

Of his gold ether, golden alguazil.

Except because he broods there and is still,

Panache upon panache, his tails deploy

Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,

His tip a drop of water full of storms.

But though the turbulent tinges undulate

As his pure intellect applies its laws,

He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.

He munches a dry shell while he exerts

His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock,

To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.

[120]

Life Is Motion

In Oklahoma,

Bonnie and Josie,

Dressed in calico,

Danced around a stump.

They cried,

“Ohoyaho,

Ohoo” ...

Celebrating the marriage

Of flesh and air.

[121]

Architecture

I

What manner of building shall we build?

Let us design a chastel de chasteté.

De pensée....

Never cease to deploy the structure.

Keep the laborers shouldering plinths.

Pass the whole of life earing the clink of the

Chisels of the stone-cutters cutting the stones.

II

In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?

What heavenly dithyramb

And cantilene?

What niggling forms of gargoyle patter?

Of what shall the speech be,

In that splay of marble

And of obedient pillars?

III

And how shall those come vested that come there?

In their ugly reminders?

Or gaudy as tulips?

As they climb the stairs

[122]

To the group of Flora Coddling Hecuba?

As they climb the flights

To the closes

Overlooking whole seasons?

IV

Let us build the building of light.

Push up the towers

To the cock-tops.

These are the pointings of our edifice,

Which, like a gorgeous palm,

Shall tuft the commonplace.

These are the window-sill

On which the quiet moonlight lies.

V

How shall we hew the sun,

Split it and make blocks,

To build a ruddy palace?

How carve the violet moon

To set in nicks?

Let us fix portals, east and west,

Abhorring green-blue north and blue-green south.

Our chiefest dome a demoiselle of gold.

Pierce the interior with pouring shafts,

In diverse chambers.

Pierce, too, with buttresses of coral air

And purple timbers,

Various argentines,

Embossings of the sky.

[123]

VI

And, finally, set guardians in the grounds,

Gray, gruesome grumblers.

For no one proud, nor stiff,

No solemn one, nor pale,

No chafferer, may come

To sully the begonias, nor vex

With holy or sublime ado

The kremlin of kermess.

VII

Only the lusty and the plenteous

Shall walk

The bronze-filled plazas

And the nut-shell esplanades.

[124]

The Wind Shifts

This is how the wind shifts:

Like the thoughts of an old human,

Who still thinks eagerly

And despairingly.

The wind shifts like this:

Like a human without illusions,

Who still feels irrational things within her.

The wind shifts like this:

Like humans approaching proudly,

Like humans approaching angrily.

This is how the wind shifts:

Like a human, heavy and heavy,

Who does not care.

[125]

Colloquy with a Polish Aunt

Elle savait toutes les légendes du Paradis et tous les contes de la Pologne.

Revue des Deux Mondes

She

How is it that my saints from Voragine,

In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?

Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring!

She

Imagination is the will of things....

Thus, on the basis of the common drudge,

You dream of women, swathed in indigo,

Holding their books toward the nearer stars,

To read, in secret, burning secrecies....

[126]

Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,

Is just what you say.

Have it your way.

The world is ugly,

And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,

That animal eye,

Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,

That seed,

Have it your way.

The world is ugly,

And the people are sad.

[127]

Two Figures in Dense Violet Night

I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel

As to get no more from the moonlight

Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.

Use dusky words and dusky images.

Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,

But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,

Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,

And out of their droning sibilants makes

A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole

And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall

Below Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in a total blue,

Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;

That the moon shines.

[128]

Theory

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.

One is not duchess

A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:

A black vestibule;

A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.

[129]

To the One of Fictive Music

Sister and mother and diviner love,

And of the sisterhood of the living dead

Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,

And of the fragrant mothers the most dear

And queen, and of diviner love the day

And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread

Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown

Its venom of renown, and on your head

No crown is simpler than the simple hair.

Now, of the music summoned by the birth

That separates us from the wind and sea,

Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,

By being so much of the things we are,

Gross effigy and simulacrum, none

Gives motion to perfection more serene

Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,

Most rare, or ever of more kindred air

In the laborious weaving that you wear.

For so retentive of themselves are men

That music is intensest which proclaims

The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,

And of all vigils musing the obscure,

That apprehends the most which sees and names,

As in your name, an image that is sure,

[130]

Among the arrant spices of the sun,

O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom

We give ourselves our likest issuance.

Yet not too like, yet not so like to be

Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow

Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs

The difference that heavenly pity brings.

For this, musician, in your girdle fixed

Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear

A band entwining, set with fatal stones.

Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:

The imagination that we spurned and crave.

[131]

Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion

You dweller in the dark cabin,

To whom the watermelon is always purple,

Whose garden is wind and moon,

Of the two dreams, night and day,

What lover, what dreamer, would choose

The one obscured by sleep?

Here is the plantain by your door

And the best cock of red feather

That crew before the clocks.

A feme may come, leaf-green,

Whose coming may give revel

Beyond revelries of sleep,

Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,

So that the sun may speckle,

While it creaks hail.

You dweller in the dark cabin,

Rise, since rising will not waken,

And hail, cry hail, cry hail.

[132]

Peter Quince at the Clavier

I

Just as my fingers on these keys

Make music, so the self-same sounds

On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;

And thus it is that what I feel,

Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,

Is music. It is like the strain

Waked in the elders by Susanna;

Of a green evening, clear and warm,

She bathed in her still garden, while

The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb

In witching chords, and their thin blood

Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II

In the green water, clear and warm,

Susanna lay.

[133]

She searched

The touch of springs,

And found

Concealed imaginings.

She sighed,

For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood

In the cool

Of spent emotions.

She felt, among the leaves,

The dew

Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,

Still quavering.

The winds were like her maids,

On timid feet,

Fetching her woven scarves,

Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand

Muted the night.

She turned—

A cymbal crashed,

And roaring horns.

III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,

Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried

Against the elders by her side;

[134]

And as they whispered, the refrain

Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame

Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines

Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind—

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.

So evenings die, in their green going,

A wave, interminably flowing.

So gardens die, their meek breath scenting

The cowl of winter, done repenting.

So maidens die, to the auroral

Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings

Of those white elders; but, escaping,

Left only Death’s ironic scraping.

Now, in its immortality, it plays

On the clear viol of her memory,

And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

[135]

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the black bird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

[136]

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

[137]

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

[138]

Nomad Exquisite

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth

The big-finned palm

And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth hymn and hymn

From the beholder,

Beholding all these green sides

And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,

Meet for the eye of the young alligator,

And lightning colors

So, in me, come flinging

Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

[139]

Tea

When the elephant’s-ear in the park

Shrivelled in frost,

And the leaves on the paths

Ran like rats,

Your lamp-light fell

On shining pillows,

Of sea-shades and sky-shades,

Like umbrellas in Java.

[140]

To the Roaring Wind

What syllable are you seeking,

Vocalissimus,

In the distances of sleep?

Speak it.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographic errors silently corrected.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78743 ***

Harmonium

Contents

Earthy Anecdote

Invective against Swans

In the Carolinas

The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

The Plot against the Giant

Infanta Marina

Domination of Black

The Snow Man

The Ordinary Women

The Load of Sugar-Cane

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

Nuances of a Theme by Williams

I

II

Metaphors of a Magnifico

Ploughing on Sunday

Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges

Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores

Fabliau of Florida

The Doctor of Geneva

Another Weeping Woman

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile

The Comedian as the Letter C

I The World without Imagination

II Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

III Approaching Carolina

IV The Idea of a Colony

V A Nice Shady Home

VI And Daughters with Curls

From the Misery of Don Joost

O, Florida, Venereal Soil

Last Looks at the Lilacs

The Worms at Heaven’s Gate

The Jack-Rabbit

Valley Candle

Anecdote of Men by the Thousand

The Silver Plough-Boy

The Apostrophe to Vincentine

I

II

III

IV

Floral Decorations for Bananas

Anecdote of Canna

Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds

Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb

Of the Surface of Things

I

II

III

Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

The Place of the Solitaires

The Weeping Burgher

The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician

Banal Sojourn

Depression before Spring

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

The Cuban Doctor

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Exposition of the Contents of a Cab

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

Sunday Morning

I

II

III

I
The World without Imagination

II
Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

III
Approaching Carolina

IV
The Idea of a Colony

V
A Nice Shady Home

VI
And Daughters with Curls