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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77837 ***
+
+
+
+
+                            White Buildings:
+                          Poems by Hart Crane
+
+                          _With a Foreword by_
+                               ALLEN TATE
+
+
+                             [Illustration]
+
+
+                         BONI & LIVERIGHT, 1926
+
+
+                          COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY
+                         BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
+                      PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
+
+                             [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+                                   To
+                              WALDO FRANK
+
+
+
+
+    Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avançant.
+                                -RIMBAUD.
+
+
+
+
+        Certain of these poems have appeared
+        in the following magazines: _Broom_,
+        _The Dial_, _Double Dealer_, _Fugitive_,
+        _Little Review_, _1924_, _Poetry_, _Secession_,
+        and _The Calendar_ (London).
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+The poetry of Hart Crane is ambitious. It is the only poetry I am
+acquainted with which is at once contemporary and in the grand manner.
+It is an American poetry. Crane’s themes are abstractly, metaphysically
+conceived, but they are definitely confined to an experience of the
+American scene. In such poems as The Wine Menagerie, For the Marriage of
+Faustus and Helen, Recitative, he is the poet of the complex urban
+civilization of his age: precision, abstraction, power. There is no
+_pastiche_; when he employs symbols from traditional literature, the
+intention is personally symbolic; it is never falsely pretentious with
+the common baggage of poetical speech, the properties coveted by the
+vulgar as inherently poetic.
+
+Hart Crane’s first experiments in verse are not, of course, collected in
+this volume, which contains with one or two exceptions only those poems
+exhibiting the qualities likely to be permanent in his work. Of these
+exceptions there is the perfectly written piece of Imagism, Garden
+Abstract. This poem evinces several properties of the “new poetry” of a
+decade ago, the merits and the limitations of the Imagists. To the
+Imagists Crane doubtless went to school in poetry. He learned their
+structural economy; he followed their rejection of the worn-out poetic
+phrase; he must have studied the experiments in rhythm of Pound,
+Aldington, Fletcher. From Pound and Eliot he got his first conception of
+what it is, in the complete sense, to be contemporary.
+
+But Crane suddenly and profoundly broke with the methods of Imagism,
+with its decorative and fragmentary world. To the conceptual mind a
+world set up not by inclusive assertion but by exclusive attention to
+the objects of sense lacks imaginative coördination; a method which
+refuses to exceed the dry presentation of _petites sensations_ confines
+the creative vision to suggestions, to implicit indications, but it
+cannot arrive at the direct affirmation, of a complete world. A series
+of Imagistic poems is a series of worlds. The poems of Hart Crane are
+facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single
+evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form
+of its realization.
+
+The poet who tries to release the imagination as an integer of
+perception attempts the solution of the leading contemporary problem of
+his art. It would be impertinent to enumerate here the underlying causes
+of the dissociation of the modern consciousness: the poet no longer
+apprehends his world as a Whole. The dissociation appears decisively for
+the first time in Baudelaire. It is the separation of vision and
+subject; since Baudelaire’s time poets have in some sense been deficient
+in the one or the other. For the revolt of Rimbaud, in this distinction,
+was a repudiation of the commonly available themes of poetry, followed
+by a steady attenuation of vision in the absence of thematic control.
+Exactly to the extent to which the ready-pmade theme controls the
+vision, the vision is restricted by tradition and may, to that extent,
+be defined by tradition. In The Waste Land, which revives the essence of
+the problem, Mr. Eliot displays vision and subject once more in
+traditional schemes; the vision for some reason is dissipated, and the
+subject dead. For while Mr. Eliot might have written a more ambitiously
+unified poem, the unity would have been false; tradition as unity is not
+contemporary. The important contemporary poet has the rapidly
+diminishing privilege of reorganizing the subjects of the past. He must
+construct and assimilate his own subjects. Dante had only to assimilate
+his.
+
+If the energy of Crane’s vision never quite reaches a sustained maximum,
+it is because he has not found a suitable theme. To realize even
+partially, at the present time, the maximum of poetic energy
+demonstrates an important intention. Crane’s poems are a fresh vision of
+the world, so intensely personalized in a new creative language that
+only the strictest and most unprepossessed effort of attention can take
+it in. Until vision and subject completely fuse, the poems will be
+difficult. The comprehensiveness and lucidity of any poetry, the
+capacity for poetry being assumed as proved, are in direct proportion to
+the availability of a comprehensive and perfectly articulated given
+theme.
+
+Crane wields a sonorous rhetoric that takes the reader to Marlowe and
+the Elizabethans. His blank verse, the most sustained medium he
+controls, is pre-Websterian; it is measured, richly textured,
+rhetorical. But his spiritual allegiances are outside the English
+tradition. Melville and Whitman are his avowed masters. In his sea
+poems, Voyages, in Emblems of Conduct, in allusions to the sea
+throughout his work, there is something of Melville’s intense,
+transcendental brooding on the mystery of the “high interiors of the
+sea.” I do not know whether he has mastered Poe’s criticism, yet some of
+his conviction that the poet should be intensely local must stem from
+Poe. Most of it, however, he undoubtedly gets from Whitman. Whitman’s
+range was possible in an America of prophecy; Crane’s America is
+materially the same, but it approaches a balance of forces; it is a
+realization; and the poet, confronted with a complex present experience,
+gains in intensity what he loses in range. The great proportions of the
+myth have collapsed in its reality. Crane’s poetry is a concentration of
+certain phases of the Whitman substance, the fragments of the myth.
+
+The great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader is the style.
+It is possible that his style may check the immediate currency of the
+most distinguished American poetry of the age, for there has been very
+little preparation in America for a difficult poetry; the Imagistic
+impressionism of the last ten years has not supplied it. Although Crane
+is probably not a critical and systematic reader of foreign literatures,
+his French is better than Whitman’s; he may have learned something from
+Laforgue and, particularly, Rimbaud; or something of these poets from
+Miss Sitwell, Mr. Wallace Stevens, or Mr. T. S. Eliot.
+
+He shares with Rimbaud the device of oblique presentation of theme. The
+theme never appears in explicit statement. It is formulated through a
+series of complex metaphors which defy a paraphrasing of the sense into
+an equivalent prose. The reader is plunged into a strangely unfamiliar
+_milieu_ of sensation, and the principle of its organization is not
+immediately grasped. The _logical_ meaning can never be derived (see
+Passage, Lachrymae Christi); but the _poetical_ meaning is a direct
+intuition, realized prior to an explicit knowledge of the subject-matter
+of the poem. The poem does not _convey_; it _presents_; it is not
+topical, but expressive.
+
+There is the opinion abroad that Crane’s poetry is, in some indefinite
+sense, “new.” It is likely to be appropriated by one of the several
+esoteric cults of the American soul. It tends toward the formation of a
+state of mind, the critical equivalent of which would be in effect an
+exposure of the confusion and irrelevance of the current journalism of
+poetry, and of how far behind the creative impulse the critical
+intelligence, at the moment, lags. It is to be hoped, therefore, that
+this state of mind, where it may be registered at all, will not at its
+outset be shunted into a false context of obscure religious values, that
+a barrier will not be erected between it and the rational order of
+criticism. For, unless the present critic is deceived as to the
+structure of his tradition, the well-meaning criticism since Poe has
+supported a vicious confusion: it has transferred the states of mind of
+poetry from their proper contexts to the alien contexts of moral and
+social aspiration. The moral emphasis is valid; but its focus on the
+consequences of the state of mind, instead of on its properties as art,
+has throttled a tradition in poetry. The moral values of literature
+should derive from literature, not from the personal values of the
+critic; their public circulation in criticism, if they are not
+ultimately to be rendered inimical to literature, should be controlled
+by the literary intention. There have been poetries of “genius” in
+America, but each of these as poetry has been scattered, and converted
+into an _impasse_ to further extensions of the same order of
+imagination.
+
+A living art is new; it is old. The formula which I have contrived in
+elucidation of Crane’s difficulty for the reader (a thankless task,
+since the difficulty inheres equally in him) is a formula for most
+romantic poetry. Shelley could not have been influenced by Rimbaud, but
+he wrote this “difficult” verse:
+
+    _Pinnacled dim in the intense inane._
+
+The present faults of Crane’s poetry (it has its faults: it is not the
+purpose of this Foreword to disguise them) cannot be isolated in a
+line-by-line recognition of his difficulty. If the poems are sometimes
+obscure, the obscurity is structural and deeper. His faults, as I have
+indicated, lie in the occasional failure of meeting between vision and
+subject. The vision often strains and overreaches the theme. This fault,
+common among ambitious poets since Baudelaire, is not unique with them.
+It appears whenever the existing poetic order no longer supports the
+imagination. It appeared in the eighteenth century with the poetry of
+William Blake.
+
+                                                 ALLEN TATE.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+FOREWORD, _by Allen Tate_                                             xi
+
+LEGEND                                                                 3
+
+BLACK TAMBOURINE                                                       5
+
+EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT                                                     6
+
+MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS                                          7
+
+SUNDAY MORNING APPLES                                                  9
+
+PRAISE FOR AN URN                                                     11
+
+GARDEN ABSTRACT                                                       13
+
+STARK MAJOR                                                           14
+
+CHAPLINEQSUE                                                          16
+
+PASTORALE                                                             18
+
+IN SHADOW                                                             19
+
+THE FERNERY                                                           20
+
+NORTH LABRADOR                                                        21
+
+REPOSE OF RIVERS                                                      22
+
+PARAPHRASE                                                            24
+
+POSSESSIONS                                                           25
+
+LACHRYMAE CHRISTI                                                     27
+
+PASSAGE                                                               30
+
+THE WINE MENAGERIE                                                    32
+
+RECITATIVE                                                            35
+
+FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN                                 37
+
+AT MELVILLE’S TOMB                                                    45
+
+VOYAGES, I, II, III, IV, V, VI                                        49
+
+
+
+
+_White Buildings_
+
+
+
+
+WHITE BUILDINGS
+
+
+
+
+LEGEND
+
+
+    As silent as a mirror is believed
+    Realities plunge in silence by....
+
+    I am not ready for repentance;
+    Nor to match regrets. For the moth
+    Bends no more than the still
+    Imploring flame. And tremorous
+    In the white falling flakes
+    Kisses are,--
+    The only worth all granting.
+
+    It is to be learned--
+    This cleaving and this burning,
+    But only by the one who
+    Spends out himself again.
+
+    Twice and twice
+    (Again the smoking souvenir,
+    Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
+
+    Until the bright logic is won
+    Unwhispering as a mirror
+    Is believed.
+
+    Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
+    Shall string some constant harmony,--
+    Relentless caper for all those who step
+    The legend of their youth into the noon.
+
+
+
+
+BLACK TAMBOURINE
+
+
+    The interests of a black man in a cellar
+    Mark tardy judgment on the world’s closed door.
+    Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,
+    And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.
+
+    Æsop, driven to pondering, found
+    Heaven with the tortoise and the hare;
+    Fox brush and sow ear top his grave
+    And mingling incantations on the air.
+
+    The black man, forlorn in the cellar,
+    Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies,
+    Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall,
+    And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.
+
+
+
+
+EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT
+
+
+    By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched
+    The uneven valley graves. While the apostle gave
+    Alms to the meek the volcano burst
+    With sulphur and aureate rocks ...
+    For joy rides in stupendous coverings
+    Luring the living into spiritual gates.
+
+    Orators follow the universe
+    And radio the complete laws to the people.
+    The apostle conveys thought through discipline.
+    Bowls and cups fill historians with adorations,--
+    Dull lips commemorating spiritual gates.
+
+    The wanderer later chose this spot of rest
+    Where marble clouds support the sea
+    And where was finally borne a chosen hero.
+    By that time summer and smoke were past.
+    Dolphins still played, arching the horizons,
+    But only to build memories of spiritual gates.
+
+
+
+
+MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS
+
+
+    There are no stars to-night
+    But those of memory.
+    Yet how much room for memory there is
+    In the loose girdle of soft rain.
+
+    There is even room enough
+    For the letters of my mother’s mother,
+    Elizabeth,
+    That have been pressed so long
+    Into a corner of the roof
+    That they are brown and soft,
+    And liable to melt as snow.
+
+    Over the greatness of such space
+    Steps must be gentle.
+    It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
+    It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
+
+    And I ask myself:
+
+    “Are your fingers long enough to play
+    Old keys that are but echoes:
+    Is the silence strong enough
+    To carry back the music to its source
+    And back to you again
+    As though to her?”
+
+    Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
+    Through much of what she would not understand;
+    And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
+    With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
+
+
+
+
+SUNDAY MORNING APPLES
+
+_To William Sommer_
+
+
+    The leaves will fall again sometime and fill
+    The fleece of nature with those purposes
+    That are your rich and faithful strength of line.
+
+    But now there are challenges to spring
+    In that ripe nude with head
+                              reared
+    Into a realm of swords, her purple shadow
+    Bursting on the winter of the world
+    From whiteness that cries defiance to the snow.
+
+    A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling
+    Spontaneities that form their independent orbits,
+    Their own perennials of light
+    In the valley where you live
+                                (called Brandywine).
+
+    I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets,--
+    Beloved apples of seasonable madness
+    That feed your inquiries with aerial wine.
+    Put them again beside a pitcher with a knife,
+    And poise them full and ready for explosion--
+    The apples, Bill, the apples!
+
+
+
+
+PRAISE FOR AN URN
+
+_In Memoriam: Ernest Nelson_
+
+
+    It was a kind and northern face
+    That mingled in such exile guise
+    The everlasting eyes of Pierrot
+    And, of Gargantua, the laughter.
+
+    His thoughts, delivered to me
+    From the white coverlet and pillow,
+    I see now, were inheritances--
+    Delicate riders of the storm.
+
+    The slant moon on the slanting hill
+    Once moved us toward presentiments
+    Of what the dead keep, living still,
+    And such assessments of the soul
+
+    As, perched in the crematory lobby,
+    The insistent clock commented on,
+    Touching as well upon our praise
+    Of glories proper to the time.
+
+    Still, having in mind gold hair,
+    I cannot see that broken brow
+    And miss the dry sound of bees
+    Stretching across a lucid space.
+
+    Scatter these well-meant idioms
+    Into the smoky spring that fills
+    The suburbs, where they will be lost.
+    They are no trophies of the sun.
+
+
+
+
+GARDEN ABSTRACT
+
+
+    The apple on its bough is her desire,--
+    Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
+    The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
+    Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
+    Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
+    She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.
+
+    And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
+    The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
+    Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
+    Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
+    She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
+    Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
+
+
+
+
+STARK MAJOR
+
+
+    The lover’s death, how regular
+    With lifting spring and starker
+    Vestiges of the sun that somehow
+    Filter in to us before we waken.
+
+    Not yet is there that heat and sober
+    Vivisection of more clamant air
+    That hands joined in the dark will answer
+    After the daily circuits of its glare.
+
+    It is the time of sundering ...
+    Beneath the green silk counterpane
+    Her mound of undelivered life
+    Lies cool upon her--not yet pain.
+
+    And she will wake before you pass,
+    Scarcely aloud, beyond her door,
+    And every third step down the stair
+    Until you reach the muffled floor--
+
+    Will laugh and call your name; while you
+    Still answering her faint good-byes,
+    Will find the street, only to look
+    At doors and stone with broken eyes.
+
+    Walk now, and note the lover’s death.
+    Henceforth her memory is more
+    Than yours, in cries, in ecstasies
+    You cannot ever reach to share.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPLINESQUE
+
+
+    We make our meek adjustments,
+    Contented with such random consolations
+    As the wind deposits
+    In slithered and too ample pockets.
+
+    For we can still love the world, who find
+    A famished kitten on the step, and know
+    Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
+    Or warm torn elbow coverts.
+
+    We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
+    Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
+    That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
+    Facing the dull squint with what innocence
+    And what surprise!
+
+    And yet these fine collapses are not lies
+    More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
+    Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
+    We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
+    What blame to us if the heart live on.
+
+    The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
+    The moon in lonely alleys make
+    A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
+    And through all sound of gaiety and quest
+    Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
+
+
+
+
+PASTORALE
+
+
+    No more violets,
+    And the year
+    Broken into smoky panels.
+    What woods remember now
+    Her calls, her enthusiasms.
+
+    That ritual of sap and leaves
+    The sun drew out,
+    Ends in this latter muffled
+    Bronze and brass. The wind
+    Takes rein.
+
+    If, dusty, I bear
+    An image beyond this
+    Already fallen harvest,
+    I can only query, “Fool--
+    Have you remembered too long;
+
+    Or was there too little said
+    For ease or resolution--
+    Summer scarcely begun
+    And violets,
+    A few picked, the rest dead?”
+
+
+
+
+IN SHADOW
+
+
+    Out in the late amber afternoon,
+    Confused among chrysanthemums,
+    Her parasol, a pale balloon,
+    Like a waiting moon, in shadow swims.
+
+    Her furtive lace and misty hair
+    Over the garden dial distill
+    The sunlight,--then withdrawing, wear
+    Again the shadows at her will.
+
+    Gently yet suddenly, the sheen
+    Of stars inwraps her parasol.
+    She hears my step behind the green
+    Twilight, stiller than shadows, fall.
+
+    “Come, it is too late,--too late
+    To risk alone the light’s decline:
+    Nor has the evening long to wait,”--
+    But her own words are night’s and mine.
+
+
+
+
+THE FERNERY
+
+
+    The lights that travel on her spectacles
+    Seldom, now, meet a mirror in her eyes.
+    But turning, as you may chance to lift a shade
+    Beside her and her fernery, is to follow
+    The zigzags fast around dry lips composed
+    To darkness through a wreath of sudden pain.
+
+    --So, while fresh sunlight splinters humid green
+    I have known myself a nephew to confusions
+    That sometimes take up residence and reign
+    In crowns less grey--O merciless tidy hair!
+
+
+
+
+NORTH LABRADOR
+
+
+    A land of leaning ice
+    Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,
+    Flings itself silently
+    Into eternity.
+
+    “Has no one come here to win you,
+    Or left you with the faintest blush
+    Upon your glittering breasts?
+    Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?”
+
+    Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments
+    That journey toward no Spring--
+    No birth, no death, no time nor sun
+    In answer.
+
+
+
+
+REPOSE OF RIVERS
+
+
+    The willows carried a slow sound,
+    A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
+    I could never remember
+    That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
+    Till age had brought me to the sea.
+
+    Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
+    Where cypresses shared the noon’s
+    Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
+    And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
+    Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
+    Asunder....
+
+    How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
+    And all the singular nestings in the hills
+    Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
+    The pond I entered once and quickly fled--
+    I remember now its singing willow rim.
+
+    And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
+    After the city that I finally passed
+    With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
+    The monsoon cut across the delta
+    At gulf gates.... There, beyond the dykes
+
+    I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
+    And willows could not hold more steady sound.
+
+
+
+
+PARAPHRASE
+
+
+    Of a steady winking beat between
+    Systole, diastole spokes-of-a-wheel
+    One rushing from the bed at night
+    May find the record wedged in his soul.
+
+    Above the feet the clever sheets
+    Lie guard upon the integers of life:
+    For what skims in between uncurls the toe,
+    Involves the hands in purposeless repose.
+
+    But from its bracket how can the tongue tell
+    When systematic morn shall sometime flood
+    The pillow--how desperate is the light
+    That shall not rouse, how faint the crow’s cavil
+
+    As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze,
+    Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already
+    Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase
+    Among bruised roses on the papered wall.
+
+
+
+
+POSSESSIONS
+
+
+    Witness now this trust! the rain
+    That steals softly direction
+    And the key, ready to hand--sifting
+    One moment in sacrifice (the direst)
+    Through a thousand nights the flesh
+    Assaults outright for bolts that linger
+    Hidden,--O undirected as the sky
+    That through its black foam has no eyes
+    For this fixed stone of lust....
+
+    Accumulate such moments to an hour:
+    Account the total of this trembling tabulation.
+    I know the screen, the distant flying taps
+    And stabbing medley that sways--
+    And the mercy, feminine, that stays
+    As though prepared.
+
+    And I, entering, take up the stone
+    As quiet as you can make a man ...
+    In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void,
+    Wounded by apprehensions out of speech,
+    I hold it up against a disk of light--
+    I, turning, turning on smoked forking spires,
+    The city’s stubborn lives, desires.
+
+    Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies,
+    Lacks all but piteous admissions to be spilt
+    Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns
+    Record of rage and partial appetites.
+    The pure possession, the inclusive cloud
+    Whose heart is fire shall come,--the white wind rase
+    All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays.
+
+
+
+
+LACHRYMAE CHRISTI
+
+
+    Whitely, while benzine
+    Rinsings from the moon
+    Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
+    (Inside the sure machinery
+    Is still
+    And curdled only where a sill
+    Sluices its one unyielding smile)
+
+    Immaculate venom binds
+    The fox’s teeth, and swart
+    Thorns freshen on the year’s
+    First blood. From flanks unfended,
+    Twanged red perfidies of spring
+    Are trillion on the hill.
+
+    And the nights opening
+    Chant pyramids,--
+    Anoint with innocence,--recall
+    To music and retrieve what perjuries
+    Had galvanized the eyes.
+
+                      While chime
+    Beneath and all around
+    Distilling clemencies,--worms’
+    Inaudible whistle, tunneling
+    Not penitence
+    But song, as these
+    Perpetual fountains, vines,--
+
+    Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes.
+
+    (Let sphinxes from the ripe
+    Borage of death have cleared my tongue
+    Once and again; vermin and rod
+    No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
+    Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
+    Betrayed stones slowly speak.)
+
+    Names peeling from Thine eyes
+    And their undimming lattices of flame,
+    Spell out in palm and pain
+    Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene.
+
+    Lean long from sable, slender boughs,
+    Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights
+    Strike from Thee perfect spheres,
+    Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail
+    Of earth again--
+
+                      Thy face
+    From charred and riven stakes, O
+    Dionysus, Thy
+    Unmangled target smile.
+
+
+
+
+PASSAGE
+
+
+    Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
+    I heard the sea.
+    In sapphire arenas of the hills
+    I was promised an improved infancy.
+
+    Sulking, sanctioning the sun,
+    My memory I left in a ravine,--
+    Casual louse that tissues the buckwheat,
+    Aprons rocks, congregates pears
+    In moonlit bushels
+    And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.
+
+    Dangerously the summer burned
+    (I had joined the entrainments of the wind).
+    The shadows of boulders lengthened my back:
+    In the bronze gongs of my cheeks
+    The rain dried without odour.
+
+    “It is not long, it is not long;
+    See where the red and black
+    Vine-stanchioned valleys--”: but the wind
+    Died speaking through the ages that you know
+    And hug, chimney-sooted heart of man!
+    So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke
+    Compiles a too well known biography.
+
+    The evening was a spear in the ravine
+    That throve through very oak. And had I walked
+    The dozen particular decimals of time?
+    Touching an opening laurel, I found
+    A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.
+
+    “Why are you back here--smiling an iron coffin?”
+    “To argue with the laurel,” I replied:
+    “Am justified in transience, fleeing
+    Under the constant wonder of your eyes--.”
+
+    He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies
+    Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss.
+    A serpent swam a vertex to the sun
+    --On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed.
+    What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches?
+    Memory, committed to the page, had broke.
+
+
+
+
+THE WINE MENAGERIE
+
+
+    Invariably when wine redeems the sight,
+    Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes,
+    A leopard ranging always in the brow
+    Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.
+
+    Then glozening decanters that reflect the street
+    Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow
+    Applause flows into liquid cynosures:
+    --I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow.
+
+    Against the imitation onyx wainscoting
+    (Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure)
+    Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her.
+    Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets,
+    Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world....
+
+    What is it in this heap the serpent pries--
+    Whose skin, facsimile of time, unskeins
+    Octagon, sapphire transepts round the eyes;
+    --From whom some whispered carillon assures
+    Speed to the arrow into feathered skies?
+
+    Sharp to the windowpane guile drags a face,
+    And as the alcove of her jealousy recedes
+    An urchin who has left the snow
+    Nudges a cannister across the bar
+    While August meadows somewhere clasp his brow.
+
+    Each chamber, transept, coins some squint,
+    Remorseless line, minting their separate wills--
+    Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out,
+    Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals:
+    Between black tusks the roses shine!
+
+    New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons
+    Build freedom up about me and distill
+    This competence--to travel in a tear
+    Sparkling alone, within another’s will.
+
+    Until my blood dreams a receptive smile
+    Wherein new purities are snared; where chimes
+    Before some flame of gaunt repose a shell
+    Tolled once, perhaps, by every tongue in hell.
+    --Anguished, the wit that cries out of me:
+
+    “Alas,--these frozen billows of your skill!
+    Invent new dominoes of love and bile ...
+    Ruddy, the tooth implicit of the world
+    Has followed you. Though in the end you know
+    And count some dim inheritance of sand,
+    How much yet meets the treason of the snow.
+
+    “Rise from the dates and crumbs. And walk away,
+    Stepping over Holofernes’ shins--
+    Beyond the wall, whose severed head floats by
+    With Baptist John’s. Their whispering begins.
+
+    “--And fold your exile on your back again;
+    Petrushka’s valentine pivots on its pin.”
+
+
+
+
+RECITATIVE
+
+
+    Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced,
+    As double as the hands that twist this glass.
+    Such eyes at search or rest you cannot see;
+    Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear!
+
+    Twin shadowed halves: the breaking second holds
+    In each the skin alone, and so it is
+    I crust a plate of vibrant mercury
+    Borne cleft to you, and brother in the half.
+
+    Inquire this much-exacting fragment smile,
+    Its drums and darkest blowing leaves ignore,--
+    Defer though, revocation of the tears
+    That yield attendance to one crucial sign.
+
+    Look steadily--how the wind feasts and spins
+    The brain’s disk shivered against lust. Then watch
+    While darkness, like an ape’s face, falls away,
+    And gradually white buildings answer day.
+
+    Let the same nameless gulf beleaguer us--
+    Alike suspend us from atrocious sums
+    Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant
+    The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream.
+
+    The highest tower,--let her ribs palisade
+    Wrenched gold of Nineveh;--yet leave the tower.
+    The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves;
+    A wind abides the ensign of your will....
+
+    In alternating bells have you not heard
+    All hours clapped dense into a single stride?
+    Forgive me for an echo of these things,
+    And let us walk through time with equal pride.
+
+
+
+
+FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN
+
+    “_And so we may arrive by Talmud skill
+    And profane Greek to raise the building up
+    Of Helen’s house against the Ismaelite,
+    King of Thogarma, and his habergeons
+    Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force
+    Of King Abaddon, and the beast of Cittim;
+    Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos,
+    And Aben Ezra do interpret Rome._”
+
+    --THE ALCHEMIST.
+
+
+I
+
+    The mind has shown itself at times
+    Too much the baked and labeled dough
+    Divided by accepted multitudes.
+    Across the stacked partitions of the day--
+    Across the memoranda, baseball scores,
+    The stenographic smiles and stock quotations
+    Smutty wings flash out equivocations.
+
+    The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;
+    Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd
+    The margins of the day, accent the curbs,
+    Convoying divers dawns on every corner
+    To druggist, barber and tobacconist,
+    Until the graduate opacities of evening
+    Take them away as suddenly to somewhere
+    Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.
+
+     _There is the world dimensional for those untwisted by the love of
+     things irreconcilable._ ...
+
+    And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
+    The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
+    Without recall,--lost yet poised in traffic.
+    Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,
+    Still flickering with those prefigurations--
+    Prodigal, yet uncontested now,
+    Half-riant before the jerky window frame.
+
+    There is some way, I think, to touch
+    Those hands of yours that count the nights
+    Stippled with pink and green advertisements.
+    And now, before its arteries turn dark
+    I would have you meet this bartered blood.
+    Imminent in his dream, none better knows
+    The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words
+    Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.
+
+    Reflective conversion of all things
+    At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread
+    The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread
+    Impinging on the throat and sides....
+    Inevitable, the body of the world
+    Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus
+    That winks above it, bluet in your breasts.
+
+    The earth may glide diaphanous to death;
+    But if I lift my arms it is to bend
+    To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing
+    The press of troubled hands, too alternate
+    With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
+    I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame
+    You found in final chains, no captive then--
+    Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
+    White, through white cities passed on to assume
+    That world which comes to each of us alone.
+
+    Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,
+    Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
+    That beat, continuous, to hourless days--
+    One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.
+
+
+II
+
+    Brazen hypnotics glitter here;
+    Glee shifts from foot to foot,
+    Magnetic to their tremulo.
+    This crashing opera bouffe,
+    Blest excursion! this ricochet
+    From roof to roof--
+    Know, Olympians, we are breathless
+    While nigger cupids scour the stars!
+
+    A thousand light shrugs balance us
+    Through snarling hails of melody.
+    White shadows slip across the floor
+    Splayed like cards from a loose hand;
+    Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters
+    Until somewhere a rooster banters.
+
+    Greet naïvely--yet intrepidly
+    New soothings, new amazements
+    That cornets introduce at every turn--
+    And you may fall downstairs with me
+    With perfect grace and equanimity.
+    Or, plaintively scud past shores
+    Where, by strange harmonic laws
+    All relatives, serene and cool,
+    Sit rocked in patent armchairs.
+
+    O, I have known metallic paradises
+    Where cuckoos clucked to finches
+    Above the deft catastrophes of drums.
+    While titters hailed the groans of death
+    Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen
+    The incunabula of the divine grotesque.
+    This music has a reassuring way.
+
+    The siren of the springs of guilty song--
+    Let us take her on the incandescent wax
+    Striated with nuances, nervosities
+    That we are heir to: she is still so young,
+    We cannot frown upon her as she smiles,
+    Dipping here in this cultivated storm
+    Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.
+
+
+III
+
+    Capped arbiter of beauty in this street
+    That narrows darkly into motor dawn,--
+    You, here beside me, delicate ambassador
+    Of intricate slain numbers that arise
+    In whispers, naked of steel;
+                              religious gunman!
+    Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon,
+    And in other ways than as the wind settles
+    On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city:
+    Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.
+
+                                  We even,
+    Who drove speediest destruction
+    In corymbulous formations of mechanics,--
+    Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice
+    Plangent over meadows, and looked down
+    On rifts of torn and empty houses
+    Like old women with teeth unjubilant
+    That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:
+
+    We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers
+    The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus,
+    The mounted, yielding cities of the air!
+
+    That saddled sky that shook down vertical
+    Repeated play of fire--no hypogeum
+    Of wave or rock was good against one hour.
+    We did not ask for that, but have survived
+    And will persist to speak again before
+    All stubble streets that have not curved
+    To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm
+    That lowers down the arc of Helen’s brow
+    To saturate with blessing and dismay.
+
+    A goose, tobacco and cologne--
+    Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven,
+    The lavish heart shall always have to leaven
+    And spread with bells and voices, and atone
+    The abating shadows of our conscript dust.
+
+    Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea,--
+    The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,
+    Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;
+    Delve upward for the new and scattered wine,
+    O brother-thief of time, that we recall.
+    Laugh out the meager penance of their days
+    Who dare not share with us the breath released,
+    The substance drilled and spent beyond repair
+    For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.
+
+    Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile
+    Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height
+    The imagination spans beyond despair,
+    Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.
+
+
+
+
+AT MELVILLE’S TOMB
+
+
+    Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
+    The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
+    An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
+    Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
+
+    And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
+    The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
+    A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
+    The portent wound in corridors of shells.
+
+    Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
+    Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
+    Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
+    And silent answers crept across the stars.
+
+    Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
+    No farther tides.... High in the azure steeps
+    Monody shall not wake the mariner.
+    This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
+
+
+
+
+
+VOYAGES
+
+
+I
+
+    Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
+    Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
+    They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
+    And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
+    Gaily digging and scattering.
+
+    And in answer to their treble interjections
+    The sun beats lightning on the waves,
+    The waves fold thunder on the sand;
+    And could they hear me I would tell them:
+
+    O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
+    Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
+    By time and the elements; but there is a line
+    You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
+    Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
+    Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
+    The bottom of the sea is cruel.
+
+
+II
+
+    --And yet this great wink of eternity,
+    Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
+    Samite sheeted and processioned where
+    Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
+    Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
+
+    Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
+    On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
+    The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
+    As her demeanors motion well or ill,
+    All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.
+
+    And onward, as bells off San Salvador
+    Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
+    In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--
+    Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
+    Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
+
+    Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
+    And hasten while her penniless rich palms
+    Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,--
+    Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire,
+    Close round one instant in one floating flower.
+
+    Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
+    O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
+    Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
+    Is answered in the vortex of our grave
+    The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
+
+
+III
+
+    Infinite consanguinity it bears--
+    This tendered theme of you that light
+    Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
+    Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
+    While ribboned water lanes I wind
+    Are laved and scattered with no stroke
+    Wide from your side, whereto this hour
+    The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.
+
+    And so, admitted through black swollen gates
+    That must arrest all distance otherwise,--
+    Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
+    Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
+    Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
+    Your body rocking!
+                        and where death, if shed,
+    Presumes no carnage, but this single change,--
+    Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
+    The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
+
+    Permit me voyage, love, into your hands....
+
+
+IV
+
+    Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
+    I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
+    Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
+    Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
+    Chilled albatross’s white immutability)
+    No stream of greater love advancing now
+    Than, singing, this mortality alone
+    Through clay aflow immortally to you.
+
+    All fragrance irrefragibly, and claim
+    Madly meeting logically in this hour
+    And region that is ours to wreathe again,
+    Portending eyes and lips and making told
+    The chancel port and portion of our June--
+
+    Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
+    Bright staves of flowers and quills to-day as I
+    Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?
+
+    In signature of the incarnate word
+    The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
+    Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
+    And widening noon within your breast for gathering
+    All bright insinuations that my years have caught
+    For islands where must lead inviolably
+    Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,--
+
+    In this expectant, still exclaim receive
+    The secret oar and petals of all love.
+
+
+V
+
+    Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
+    Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
+    Together in one merciless white blade--
+    The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.
+
+    --As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
+    The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
+    Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
+    One frozen trackless smile.... What words
+    Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we
+
+    Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
+    Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
+    Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
+    And changed.... “There’s
+
+    Nothing like this in the world,” you say,
+    Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
+    Too, into that godless cleft of sky
+    Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.
+
+    “--And never to quite understand!” No,
+    In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
+    Nothing so flagless as this piracy.
+
+                                  But now
+    Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
+    Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
+    Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
+    Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
+
+
+VI
+
+    Where icy and bright dungeons lift
+    Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
+    And ocean rivers, churning, shift
+    Green borders under stranger skies,
+    Steadily as a shell secretes
+    Its beating leagues of monotone,
+    Or as many waters trough the sun’s
+    Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone;
+
+    O rivers mingling toward the sky
+    And harbor of the phœnix’ breast--
+    My eyes pressed black against the prow,
+    --Thy derelict and blinded guest
+
+    Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
+    I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
+    More savage than the death of kings,
+    Some splintered garland for the seer.
+
+    Beyond siroccos harvesting
+    The solstice thunders, crept away,
+    Like a cliff swinging or a sail
+    Flung into April’s inmost day--
+
+    Creation’s blithe and petalled word
+    To the lounged goddess when she rose
+    Conceding dialogue with eyes
+    That smile unsearchable repose--
+
+    Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
+    --Unfolded floating dais before
+    Which rainbows twine continual hair--
+    Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!
+
+    The imaged Word, it is, that holds
+    Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
+    It is the unbetrayable reply
+    Whose accent no farewell can know.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77837 ***
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+  <head>
+<link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+
+<meta charset="utf-8">
+<title>
+  The Project Gutenberg eBook of White Buildings: Poems, by Hart Crane.
+</title>
+<style>
+
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+.poem span.i10     {display: block; margin-left: 8em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+</style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77837 ***</div>
+<hr class="full">
+
+<div class="c">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="349" height="550" alt="">
+</div>
+
+<h1>
+White Buildings:</h1>
+<p class="c">Poems by Hart Crane<br><br>
+<i>With a Foreword by</i><br>
+ALLEN TATE</p>
+
+<p class="c">BONI &amp; LIVERIGHT, 1926</p>
+
+<div class="poetry"><div class="poem">
+<p class="nind"><small>COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY</small><br>
+BONI &amp; LIVERIGHT, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span><br>
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
+</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="c">
+To<br>
+WALDO FRANK<br>
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avançant.<br></span>
+<span class="i10">-<span class="smcap">Rimbaud.</span><br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="poetry"><div class="poem">
+<p class="nind">
+Certain of these poems have appeared<br>
+in the following magazines: <i>Broom</i>,<br>
+<i>The Dial</i>, <i>Double Dealer</i>, <i>Fugitive</i>,<br>
+<i>Little Review</i>, <i>1924</i>, <i>Poetry</i>, <i>Secession</i>,<br>
+and <i>The Calendar</i> (London).<br>
+</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xi">{xi}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="FOREWORD">FOREWORD</a></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> poetry of Hart Crane is ambitious. It is the only poetry I am
+acquainted with which is at once contemporary and in the grand manner.
+It is an American poetry. Crane’s themes are abstractly, metaphysically
+conceived, but they are definitely confined to an experience of the
+American scene. In such poems as The Wine Menagerie, For the Marriage of
+Faustus and Helen, Recitative, he is the poet of the complex urban
+civilization of his age: precision, abstraction, power. There is no
+<i>pastiche</i>; when he employs symbols from traditional literature, the
+intention is personally symbolic; it is never falsely pretentious with
+the common baggage of poetical speech, the properties coveted by the
+vulgar as inherently poetic.</p>
+
+<p>Hart Crane’s first experiments in verse are not, of course, collected in
+this volume, which contains with one or two exceptions only those poems
+exhibiting the qualities likely to be permanent in his work. Of these
+exceptions there is the perfectly written piece of Imagism, Garden<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xii">{xii}</a></span>
+Abstract. This poem evinces several properties of the “new poetry” of a
+decade ago, the merits and the limitations of the Imagists. To the
+Imagists Crane doubtless went to school in poetry. He learned their
+structural economy; he followed their rejection of the worn-out poetic
+phrase; he must have studied the experiments in rhythm of Pound,
+Aldington, Fletcher. From Pound and Eliot he got his first conception of
+what it is, in the complete sense, to be contemporary.</p>
+
+<p>But Crane suddenly and profoundly broke with the methods of Imagism,
+with its decorative and fragmentary world. To the conceptual mind a
+world set up not by inclusive assertion but by exclusive attention to
+the objects of sense lacks imaginative coördination; a method which
+refuses to exceed the dry presentation of <i>petites sensations</i> confines
+the creative vision to suggestions, to implicit indications, but it
+cannot arrive at the direct affirmation, of a complete world. A series
+of Imagistic poems is a series of worlds. The poems of Hart Crane are
+facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single
+evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form
+of its realization.</p>
+
+<p>The poet who tries to release the imagination as an integer of
+perception attempts the solution of the leading contemporary problem of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span>
+his art. It would be impertinent to enumerate here the underlying causes
+of the dissociation of the modern consciousness: the poet no longer
+apprehends his world as a Whole. The dissociation appears decisively for
+the first time in Baudelaire. It is the separation of vision and
+subject; since Baudelaire’s time poets have in some sense been deficient
+in the one or the other. For the revolt of Rimbaud, in this distinction,
+was a repudiation of the commonly available themes of poetry, followed
+by a steady attenuation of vision in the absence of thematic control.
+Exactly to the extent to which the ready-pmade theme controls the
+vision, the vision is restricted by tradition and may, to that extent,
+be defined by tradition. In The Waste Land, which revives the essence of
+the problem, Mr. Eliot displays vision and subject once more in
+traditional schemes; the vision for some reason is dissipated, and the
+subject dead. For while Mr. Eliot might have written a more ambitiously
+unified poem, the unity would have been false; tradition as unity is not
+contemporary. The important contemporary poet has the rapidly
+diminishing privilege of reorganizing the subjects of the past. He must
+construct and assimilate his own subjects. Dante had only to assimilate
+his.</p>
+
+<p>If the energy of Crane’s vision never quite reaches a sustained maximum,
+it is because he<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span> has not found a suitable theme. To realize even
+partially, at the present time, the maximum of poetic energy
+demonstrates an important intention. Crane’s poems are a fresh vision of
+the world, so intensely personalized in a new creative language that
+only the strictest and most unprepossessed effort of attention can take
+it in. Until vision and subject completely fuse, the poems will be
+difficult. The comprehensiveness and lucidity of any poetry, the
+capacity for poetry being assumed as proved, are in direct proportion to
+the availability of a comprehensive and perfectly articulated given
+theme.</p>
+
+<p>Crane wields a sonorous rhetoric that takes the reader to Marlowe and
+the Elizabethans. His blank verse, the most sustained medium he
+controls, is pre-Websterian; it is measured, richly textured,
+rhetorical. But his spiritual allegiances are outside the English
+tradition. Melville and Whitman are his avowed masters. In his sea
+poems, Voyages, in Emblems of Conduct, in allusions to the sea
+throughout his work, there is something of Melville’s intense,
+transcendental brooding on the mystery of the “high interiors of the
+sea.” I do not know whether he has mastered Poe’s criticism, yet some of
+his conviction that the poet should be intensely local must stem from
+Poe. Most of it, however, he undoubtedly gets from Whitman. Whitman’s
+range was possible<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xv">{xv}</a></span> in an America of prophecy; Crane’s America is
+materially the same, but it approaches a balance of forces; it is a
+realization; and the poet, confronted with a complex present experience,
+gains in intensity what he loses in range. The great proportions of the
+myth have collapsed in its reality. Crane’s poetry is a concentration of
+certain phases of the Whitman substance, the fragments of the myth.</p>
+
+<p>The great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader is the style.
+It is possible that his style may check the immediate currency of the
+most distinguished American poetry of the age, for there has been very
+little preparation in America for a difficult poetry; the Imagistic
+impressionism of the last ten years has not supplied it. Although Crane
+is probably not a critical and systematic reader of foreign literatures,
+his French is better than Whitman’s; he may have learned something from
+Laforgue and, particularly, Rimbaud; or something of these poets from
+Miss Sitwell, Mr. Wallace Stevens, or Mr. T. S. Eliot.</p>
+
+<p>He shares with Rimbaud the device of oblique presentation of theme. The
+theme never appears in explicit statement. It is formulated through a
+series of complex metaphors which defy a paraphrasing of the sense into
+an equivalent prose. The reader is plunged into a strangely unfamiliar<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xvi">{xvi}</a></span>
+<i>milieu</i> of sensation, and the principle of its organization is not
+immediately grasped. The <i>logical</i> meaning can never be derived (see
+Passage, Lachrymae Christi); but the <i>poetical</i> meaning is a direct
+intuition, realized prior to an explicit knowledge of the subject-matter
+of the poem. The poem does not <i>convey</i>; it <i>presents</i>; it is not
+topical, but expressive.</p>
+
+<p>There is the opinion abroad that Crane’s poetry is, in some indefinite
+sense, “new.” It is likely to be appropriated by one of the several
+esoteric cults of the American soul. It tends toward the formation of a
+state of mind, the critical equivalent of which would be in effect an
+exposure of the confusion and irrelevance of the current journalism of
+poetry, and of how far behind the creative impulse the critical
+intelligence, at the moment, lags. It is to be hoped, therefore, that
+this state of mind, where it may be registered at all, will not at its
+outset be shunted into a false context of obscure religious values, that
+a barrier will not be erected between it and the rational order of
+criticism. For, unless the present critic is deceived as to the
+structure of his tradition, the well-meaning criticism since Poe has
+supported a vicious confusion: it has transferred the states of mind of
+poetry from their proper contexts to the alien contexts of moral and
+social aspiration. The moral emphasis is valid; but its focus on the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xvii">{xvii}</a></span>
+consequences of the state of mind, instead of on its properties as art,
+has throttled a tradition in poetry. The moral values of literature
+should derive from literature, not from the personal values of the
+critic; their public circulation in criticism, if they are not
+ultimately to be rendered inimical to literature, should be controlled
+by the literary intention. There have been poetries of “genius” in
+America, but each of these as poetry has been scattered, and converted
+into an <i>impasse</i> to further extensions of the same order of
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>A living art is new; it is old. The formula which I have contrived in
+elucidation of Crane’s difficulty for the reader (a thankless task,
+since the difficulty inheres equally in him) is a formula for most
+romantic poetry. Shelley could not have been influenced by Rimbaud, but
+he wrote this “difficult” verse:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.</i><br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The present faults of Crane’s poetry (it has its faults: it is not the
+purpose of this Foreword to disguise them) cannot be isolated in a
+line-by-line recognition of his difficulty. If the poems are sometimes
+obscure, the obscurity is structural and deeper. His faults, as I have
+indicated, lie in the occasional failure of meeting between vision and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xviii">{xviii}</a></span>
+subject. The vision often strains and overreaches the theme. This fault,
+common among ambitious poets since Baudelaire, is not unique with them.
+It appears whenever the existing poetic order no longer supports the
+imagination. It appeared in the eighteenth century with the poetry of
+William Blake.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Allen Tate.</span><br>
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xix">{xix}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</a></h2>
+
+<table>
+<tr><td></td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#FOREWORD">Foreword</a>, <i>by Allen Tate</i></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_xi">xi</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#LEGEND">Legend</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#BLACK_TAMBOURINE">Black Tambourine</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_5">5</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#EMBLEMS_OF_CONDUCT">Emblems of Conduct</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_6">6</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#MY_GRANDMOTHERS_LOVE_LETTERS">My Grandmother’s Love Letters</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#SUNDAY_MORNING_APPLES">Sunday Morning Apples</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#PRAISE_FOR_AN_URN">Praise for an Urn</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#GARDEN_ABSTRACT">Garden Abstract</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#STARK_MAJOR">Stark Major</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#CHAPLINESQUE">Chaplinesque</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#PASTORALE">Pastorale</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#IN_SHADOW">In Shadow</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#THE_FERNERY">The Fernery</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#NORTH_LABRADOR">North Labrador</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_21">21</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#REPOSE_OF_RIVERS">Repose of Rivers</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#PARAPHRASE">Paraphrase</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_24">24</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#POSSESSIONS">Possessions</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#LACHRYMAE_CHRISTI">Lachrymae Christi</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#PASSAGE">Passage</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#THE_WINE_MENAGERIE">The Wine Menagerie</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#RECITATIVE">Recitative</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#FOR_THE_MARRIAGE_OF_FAUSTUS_AND_HELEN">For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#AT_MELVILLES_TOMB">At Melville’s Tomb</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#VOYAGES">Voyages, I, II, III, IV, V, VI</a></td><td class="rt"><a href="#Page_49">49</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xx">{xx}</a></span>&#160; </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_1">{1}</a></span>&#160; </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2">{2}</a></span>&#160; </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3">{3}</a></span>&#160; </p>
+
+<h2><a id="White_Buildings"><i>White Buildings</i></a></h2>
+
+<h2><a id="WHITE_BUILDINGS">WHITE BUILDINGS</a></h2>
+
+<h2><a id="LEGEND">LEGEND</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As silent as a mirror is believed<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Realities plunge in silence by....<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I am not ready for repentance;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor to match regrets. For the moth<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Bends no more than the still<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Imploring flame. And tremorous<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In the white falling flakes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Kisses are,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The only worth all granting.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It is to be learned&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">This cleaving and this burning,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">But only by the one who<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Spends out himself again.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Twice and twice<br></span>
+<span class="i0">(Again the smoking souvenir,<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_4">{4}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Until the bright logic is won<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Unwhispering as a mirror<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Is believed.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall string some constant harmony,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Relentless caper for all those who step<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The legend of their youth into the noon.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_5">{5}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="BLACK_TAMBOURINE">BLACK TAMBOURINE</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The interests of a black man in a cellar<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Mark tardy judgment on the world’s closed door.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Æsop, driven to pondering, found<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Heaven with the tortoise and the hare;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Fox brush and sow ear top his grave<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And mingling incantations on the air.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The black man, forlorn in the cellar,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6">{6}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="EMBLEMS_OF_CONDUCT">EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The uneven valley graves. While the apostle gave<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Alms to the meek the volcano burst<br></span>
+<span class="i0">With sulphur and aureate rocks ...<br></span>
+<span class="i0">For joy rides in stupendous coverings<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Luring the living into spiritual gates.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Orators follow the universe<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And radio the complete laws to the people.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The apostle conveys thought through discipline.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Bowls and cups fill historians with adorations,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Dull lips commemorating spiritual gates.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The wanderer later chose this spot of rest<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Where marble clouds support the sea<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And where was finally borne a chosen hero.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">By that time summer and smoke were past.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Dolphins still played, arching the horizons,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">But only to build memories of spiritual gates.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_7">{7}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="MY_GRANDMOTHERS_LOVE_LETTERS">MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There are no stars to-night<br></span>
+<span class="i0">But those of memory.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet how much room for memory there is<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In the loose girdle of soft rain.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is even room enough<br></span>
+<span class="i0">For the letters of my mother’s mother,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Elizabeth,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That have been pressed so long<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Into a corner of the roof<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That they are brown and soft,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And liable to melt as snow.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Over the greatness of such space<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Steps must be gentle.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">It is all hung by an invisible white hair.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And I ask myself:<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Are your fingers long enough to play<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Old keys that are but echoes:<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8">{8}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Is the silence strong enough<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To carry back the music to its source<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And back to you again<br></span>
+<span class="i0">As though to her?”<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Through much of what she would not understand;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof<br></span>
+<span class="i0">With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9">{9}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="SUNDAY_MORNING_APPLES">SUNDAY MORNING APPLES</a><br><br>
+<i>To William Sommer</i></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The leaves will fall again sometime and fill<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The fleece of nature with those purposes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That are your rich and faithful strength of line.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But now there are challenges to spring<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In that ripe nude with head<br></span>
+<span class="i10">reared<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Into a realm of swords, her purple shadow<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Bursting on the winter of the world<br></span>
+<span class="i0">From whiteness that cries defiance to the snow.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Spontaneities that form their independent orbits,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Their own perennials of light<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In the valley where you live<br></span>
+<span class="i10">(called Brandywine).<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beloved apples of seasonable madness<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10">{10}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">That feed your inquiries with aerial wine.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Put them again beside a pitcher with a knife,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And poise them full and ready for explosion&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The apples, Bill, the apples!<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11">{11}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="PRAISE_FOR_AN_URN">PRAISE FOR AN URN</a><br><br>
+<i>In Memoriam: Ernest Nelson</i></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It was a kind and northern face<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That mingled in such exile guise<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The everlasting eyes of Pierrot<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And, of Gargantua, the laughter.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">His thoughts, delivered to me<br></span>
+<span class="i0">From the white coverlet and pillow,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I see now, were inheritances&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Delicate riders of the storm.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The slant moon on the slanting hill<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Once moved us toward presentiments<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Of what the dead keep, living still,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And such assessments of the soul<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As, perched in the crematory lobby,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The insistent clock commented on,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Touching as well upon our praise<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12">{12}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Of glories proper to the time.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Still, having in mind gold hair,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I cannot see that broken brow<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And miss the dry sound of bees<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Stretching across a lucid space.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Scatter these well-meant idioms<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Into the smoky spring that fills<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The suburbs, where they will be lost.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">They are no trophies of the sun.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13">{13}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="GARDEN_ABSTRACT">GARDEN ABSTRACT</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The apple on its bough is her desire,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And so she comes to dream herself the tree,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14">{14}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="STARK_MAJOR">STARK MAJOR</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The lover’s death, how regular<br></span>
+<span class="i0">With lifting spring and starker<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Vestiges of the sun that somehow<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Filter in to us before we waken.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Not yet is there that heat and sober<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Vivisection of more clamant air<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That hands joined in the dark will answer<br></span>
+<span class="i0">After the daily circuits of its glare.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It is the time of sundering ...<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beneath the green silk counterpane<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Her mound of undelivered life<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Lies cool upon her&mdash;not yet pain.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And she will wake before you pass,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Scarcely aloud, beyond her door,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And every third step down the stair<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Until you reach the muffled floor&mdash;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Will laugh and call your name; while you<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Still answering her faint good-byes,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Will find the street, only to look<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15">{15}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">At doors and stone with broken eyes.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Walk now, and note the lover’s death.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Henceforth her memory is more<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Than yours, in cries, in ecstasies<br></span>
+<span class="i0">You cannot ever reach to share.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16">{16}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="CHAPLINESQUE">CHAPLINESQUE</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We make our meek adjustments,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Contented with such random consolations<br></span>
+<span class="i0">As the wind deposits<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In slithered and too ample pockets.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For we can still love the world, who find<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A famished kitten on the step, and know<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Recesses for it from the fury of the street,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Or warm torn elbow coverts.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We will sidestep, and to the final smirk<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Facing the dull squint with what innocence<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And what surprise!<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And yet these fine collapses are not lies<br></span>
+<span class="i0">More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">We can evade you, and all else but the heart:<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17">{17}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">What blame to us if the heart live on.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The game enforces smirks; but we have seen<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The moon in lonely alleys make<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And through all sound of gaiety and quest<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18">{18}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="PASTORALE">PASTORALE</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No more violets,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And the year<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Broken into smoky panels.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">What woods remember now<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Her calls, her enthusiasms.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That ritual of sap and leaves<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The sun drew out,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Ends in this latter muffled<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Bronze and brass. The wind<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Takes rein.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If, dusty, I bear<br></span>
+<span class="i0">An image beyond this<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Already fallen harvest,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I can only query, “Fool&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Have you remembered too long;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Or was there too little said<br></span>
+<span class="i0">For ease or resolution&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Summer scarcely begun<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And violets,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A few picked, the rest dead?”<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19">{19}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="IN_SHADOW">IN SHADOW</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Out in the late amber afternoon,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Confused among chrysanthemums,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Her parasol, a pale balloon,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Like a waiting moon, in shadow swims.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Her furtive lace and misty hair<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the garden dial distill<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The sunlight,&mdash;then withdrawing, wear<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Again the shadows at her will.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Gently yet suddenly, the sheen<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Of stars inwraps her parasol.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">She hears my step behind the green<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Twilight, stiller than shadows, fall.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Come, it is too late,&mdash;too late<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To risk alone the light’s decline:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor has the evening long to wait,”&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">But her own words are night’s and mine.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20">{20}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="THE_FERNERY">THE FERNERY</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The lights that travel on her spectacles<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Seldom, now, meet a mirror in her eyes.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">But turning, as you may chance to lift a shade<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beside her and her fernery, is to follow<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The zigzags fast around dry lips composed<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To darkness through a wreath of sudden pain.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;So, while fresh sunlight splinters humid green<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I have known myself a nephew to confusions<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That sometimes take up residence and reign<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In crowns less grey&mdash;O merciless tidy hair!<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21">{21}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="NORTH_LABRADOR">NORTH LABRADOR</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A land of leaning ice<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Flings itself silently<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Into eternity.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Has no one come here to win you,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Or left you with the faintest blush<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon your glittering breasts?<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?”<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That journey toward no Spring&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">No birth, no death, no time nor sun<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In answer.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22">{22}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="REPOSE_OF_RIVERS">REPOSE OF RIVERS</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The willows carried a slow sound,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I could never remember<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That seething, steady leveling of the marshes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Till age had brought me to the sea.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Where cypresses shared the noon’s<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Asunder....<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How much I would have bartered! the black gorge<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And all the singular nestings in the hills<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The pond I entered once and quickly fled&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I remember now its singing willow rim.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And finally, in that memory all things nurse;<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23">{23}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">After the city that I finally passed<br></span>
+<span class="i0">With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The monsoon cut across the delta<br></span>
+<span class="i0">At gulf gates.... There, beyond the dykes<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And willows could not hold more steady sound.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24">{24}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="PARAPHRASE">PARAPHRASE</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Of a steady winking beat between<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Systole, diastole spokes-of-a-wheel<br></span>
+<span class="i0">One rushing from the bed at night<br></span>
+<span class="i0">May find the record wedged in his soul.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Above the feet the clever sheets<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Lie guard upon the integers of life:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">For what skims in between uncurls the toe,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Involves the hands in purposeless repose.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But from its bracket how can the tongue tell<br></span>
+<span class="i0">When systematic morn shall sometime flood<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The pillow&mdash;how desperate is the light<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That shall not rouse, how faint the crow’s cavil<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Among bruised roses on the papered wall.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25">{25}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="POSSESSIONS">POSSESSIONS</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Witness now this trust! the rain<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That steals softly direction<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And the key, ready to hand&mdash;sifting<br></span>
+<span class="i0">One moment in sacrifice (the direst)<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Through a thousand nights the flesh<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Assaults outright for bolts that linger<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Hidden,&mdash;O undirected as the sky<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That through its black foam has no eyes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">For this fixed stone of lust....<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Accumulate such moments to an hour:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Account the total of this trembling tabulation.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I know the screen, the distant flying taps<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And stabbing medley that sways&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And the mercy, feminine, that stays<br></span>
+<span class="i0">As though prepared.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And I, entering, take up the stone<br></span>
+<span class="i0">As quiet as you can make a man ...<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void,<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26">{26}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Wounded by apprehensions out of speech,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I hold it up against a disk of light&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I, turning, turning on smoked forking spires,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The city’s stubborn lives, desires.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Lacks all but piteous admissions to be spilt<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Record of rage and partial appetites.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The pure possession, the inclusive cloud<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose heart is fire shall come,&mdash;the white wind rase<br></span>
+<span class="i0">All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27">{27}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="LACHRYMAE_CHRISTI">LACHRYMAE CHRISTI</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whitely, while benzine<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Rinsings from the moon<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Dissolve all but the windows of the mills<br></span>
+<span class="i0">(Inside the sure machinery<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Is still<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And curdled only where a sill<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Sluices its one unyielding smile)<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Immaculate venom binds<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The fox’s teeth, and swart<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Thorns freshen on the year’s<br></span>
+<span class="i0">First blood. From flanks unfended,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Twanged red perfidies of spring<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Are trillion on the hill.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And the nights opening<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Chant pyramids,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Anoint with innocence,&mdash;recall<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To music and retrieve what perjuries<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28">{28}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Had galvanized the eyes.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">While chime<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beneath and all around<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Distilling clemencies,&mdash;worms’<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Inaudible whistle, tunneling<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Not penitence<br></span>
+<span class="i0">But song, as these<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Perpetual fountains, vines,&mdash;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">(Let sphinxes from the ripe<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Borage of death have cleared my tongue<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Once and again; vermin and rod<br></span>
+<span class="i0">No longer bind. Some sentient cloud<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Betrayed stones slowly speak.)<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Names peeling from Thine eyes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And their undimming lattices of flame,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Spell out in palm and pain<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Lean long from sable, slender boughs,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Strike from Thee perfect spheres,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29">{29}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Of earth again&mdash;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Thy face<br></span>
+<span class="i0">From charred and riven stakes, O<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Dionysus, Thy<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Unmangled target smile.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30">{30}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="PASSAGE">PASSAGE</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where the cedar leaf divides the sky<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I heard the sea.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In sapphire arenas of the hills<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I was promised an improved infancy.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sulking, sanctioning the sun,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">My memory I left in a ravine,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Casual louse that tissues the buckwheat,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Aprons rocks, congregates pears<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In moonlit bushels<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Dangerously the summer burned<br></span>
+<span class="i0">(I had joined the entrainments of the wind).<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The shadows of boulders lengthened my back:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In the bronze gongs of my cheeks<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The rain dried without odour.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“It is not long, it is not long;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">See where the red and black<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Vine-stanchioned valleys&mdash;”: but the wind<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31">{31}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Died speaking through the ages that you know<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And hug, chimney-sooted heart of man!<br></span>
+<span class="i0">So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Compiles a too well known biography.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The evening was a spear in the ravine<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That throve through very oak. And had I walked<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The dozen particular decimals of time?<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Touching an opening laurel, I found<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Why are you back here&mdash;smiling an iron coffin?”<br></span>
+<span class="i0">“To argue with the laurel,” I replied:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">“Am justified in transience, fleeing<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the constant wonder of your eyes&mdash;.”<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A serpent swam a vertex to the sun<br></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches?<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Memory, committed to the page, had broke.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32">{32}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="THE_WINE_MENAGERIE">THE WINE MENAGERIE</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Invariably when wine redeems the sight,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A leopard ranging always in the brow<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then glozening decanters that reflect the street<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Applause flows into liquid cynosures:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Against the imitation onyx wainscoting<br></span>
+<span class="i0">(Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure)<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world....<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What is it in this heap the serpent pries&mdash;<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33">{33}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose skin, facsimile of time, unskeins<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Octagon, sapphire transepts round the eyes;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;From whom some whispered carillon assures<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Speed to the arrow into feathered skies?<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sharp to the windowpane guile drags a face,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And as the alcove of her jealousy recedes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">An urchin who has left the snow<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Nudges a cannister across the bar<br></span>
+<span class="i0">While August meadows somewhere clasp his brow.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Each chamber, transept, coins some squint,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Remorseless line, minting their separate wills&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Between black tusks the roses shine!<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Build freedom up about me and distill<br></span>
+<span class="i0">This competence&mdash;to travel in a tear<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Sparkling alone, within another’s will.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Until my blood dreams a receptive smile<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Wherein new purities are snared; where chimes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Before some flame of gaunt repose a shell<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Tolled once, perhaps, by every tongue in hell.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Anguished, the wit that cries out of me:<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Alas,&mdash;these frozen billows of your skill!<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34">{34}</a></span><span class="i0">Invent new dominoes of love and bile ...<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Ruddy, the tooth implicit of the world<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Has followed you. Though in the end you know<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And count some dim inheritance of sand,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">How much yet meets the treason of the snow.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Rise from the dates and crumbs. And walk away,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Stepping over Holofernes’ shins&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beyond the wall, whose severed head floats by<br></span>
+<span class="i0">With Baptist John’s. Their whispering begins.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“&mdash;And fold your exile on your back again;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Petrushka’s valentine pivots on its pin.”<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35">{35}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="RECITATIVE">RECITATIVE</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">As double as the hands that twist this glass.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Such eyes at search or rest you cannot see;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear!<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Twin shadowed halves: the breaking second holds<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In each the skin alone, and so it is<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I crust a plate of vibrant mercury<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Borne cleft to you, and brother in the half.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Inquire this much-exacting fragment smile,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Its drums and darkest blowing leaves ignore,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Defer though, revocation of the tears<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That yield attendance to one crucial sign.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Look steadily&mdash;how the wind feasts and spins<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The brain’s disk shivered against lust. Then watch<br></span>
+<span class="i0">While darkness, like an ape’s face, falls away,<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36">{36}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">And gradually white buildings answer day.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Let the same nameless gulf beleaguer us&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Alike suspend us from atrocious sums<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The highest tower,&mdash;let her ribs palisade<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Wrenched gold of Nineveh;&mdash;yet leave the tower.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A wind abides the ensign of your will....<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In alternating bells have you not heard<br></span>
+<span class="i0">All hours clapped dense into a single stride?<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgive me for an echo of these things,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And let us walk through time with equal pride.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37">{37}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="FOR_THE_MARRIAGE_OF_FAUSTUS_AND_HELEN">FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<i>And so we may arrive by Talmud skill</i><br></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And profane Greek to raise the building up</i><br></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Of Helen’s house against the Ismaelite,</i><br></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>King of Thogarma, and his habergeons</i><br></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force</i><br></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Of King Abaddon, and the beast of Cittim;</i><br></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos,</i><br></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And Aben Ezra do interpret Rome.</i>”<br></span>
+<span class="i10">&mdash;THE ALCHEMIST.<br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The mind has shown itself at times<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Too much the baked and labeled dough<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Divided by accepted multitudes.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Across the stacked partitions of the day&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Across the memoranda, baseball scores,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The stenographic smiles and stock quotations<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38">{38}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Smutty wings flash out equivocations.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The margins of the day, accent the curbs,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Convoying divers dawns on every corner<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To druggist, barber and tobacconist,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Until the graduate opacities of evening<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Take them away as suddenly to somewhere<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.<br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p><i>There is the world dimensional for those untwisted by the love of
+things irreconcilable.</i> ...</p></blockquote>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And yet, suppose some evening I forgot<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The fare and transfer, yet got by that way<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Without recall,&mdash;lost yet poised in traffic.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Still flickering with those prefigurations&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Prodigal, yet uncontested now,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Half-riant before the jerky window frame.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is some way, I think, to touch<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Those hands of yours that count the nights<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Stippled with pink and green advertisements.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And now, before its arteries turn dark<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I would have you meet this bartered blood.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Imminent in his dream, none better knows<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39">{39}</a></span></div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Reflective conversion of all things<br></span>
+<span class="i0">At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Impinging on the throat and sides....<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Inevitable, the body of the world<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That winks above it, bluet in your breasts.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The earth may glide diaphanous to death;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">But if I lift my arms it is to bend<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The press of troubled hands, too alternate<br></span>
+<span class="i0">With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame<br></span>
+<span class="i0">You found in final chains, no captive then&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">White, through white cities passed on to assume<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That world which comes to each of us alone.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Bent axle of devotion along companion ways<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That beat, continuous, to hourless days&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40">{40}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Brazen hypnotics glitter here;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Glee shifts from foot to foot,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Magnetic to their tremulo.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">This crashing opera bouffe,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Blest excursion! this ricochet<br></span>
+<span class="i0">From roof to roof&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Know, Olympians, we are breathless<br></span>
+<span class="i0">While nigger cupids scour the stars!<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A thousand light shrugs balance us<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Through snarling hails of melody.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">White shadows slip across the floor<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Splayed like cards from a loose hand;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Until somewhere a rooster banters.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Greet naïvely&mdash;yet intrepidly<br></span>
+<span class="i0">New soothings, new amazements<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That cornets introduce at every turn&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And you may fall downstairs with me<br></span>
+<span class="i0">With perfect grace and equanimity.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Or, plaintively scud past shores<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Where, by strange harmonic laws<br></span>
+<span class="i0">All relatives, serene and cool,<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41">{41}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Sit rocked in patent armchairs.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O, I have known metallic paradises<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Where cuckoos clucked to finches<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Above the deft catastrophes of drums.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">While titters hailed the groans of death<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The incunabula of the divine grotesque.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">This music has a reassuring way.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The siren of the springs of guilty song&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Let us take her on the incandescent wax<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Striated with nuances, nervosities<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That we are heir to: she is still so young,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">We cannot frown upon her as she smiles,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Dipping here in this cultivated storm<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42">{42}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Capped arbiter of beauty in this street<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That narrows darkly into motor dawn,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">You, here beside me, delicate ambassador<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Of intricate slain numbers that arise<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In whispers, naked of steel;<br></span>
+<span class="i10">religious gunman!<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And in other ways than as the wind settles<br></span>
+<span class="i0">On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">We even,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Who drove speediest destruction<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In corymbulous formations of mechanics,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Plangent over meadows, and looked down<br></span>
+<span class="i0">On rifts of torn and empty houses<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Like old women with teeth unjubilant<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus,<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43">{43}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">The mounted, yielding cities of the air!<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That saddled sky that shook down vertical<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Repeated play of fire&mdash;no hypogeum<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Of wave or rock was good against one hour.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">We did not ask for that, but have survived<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And will persist to speak again before<br></span>
+<span class="i0">All stubble streets that have not curved<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That lowers down the arc of Helen’s brow<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To saturate with blessing and dismay.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A goose, tobacco and cologne&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The lavish heart shall always have to leaven<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And spread with bells and voices, and atone<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The abating shadows of our conscript dust.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Delve upward for the new and scattered wine,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">O brother-thief of time, that we recall.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Laugh out the meager penance of their days<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Who dare not share with us the breath released,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The substance drilled and spent beyond repair<br></span>
+<span class="i0">For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44">{44}</a></span></div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The imagination spans beyond despair,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45">{45}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a id="AT_MELVILLES_TOMB">AT MELVILLE’S TOMB</a></h2>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath<br></span>
+<span class="i0">An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And wrecks passed without sound of bells,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The calyx of death’s bounty giving back<br></span>
+<span class="i0">A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The portent wound in corridors of shells.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And silent answers crept across the stars.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive<br></span>
+<span class="i0">No farther tides.... High in the azure steeps<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Monody shall not wake the mariner.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46">{46}</a><br><a id="Page_47">{47}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48">{48}</a><br><a id="Page_49">{49}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a id="VOYAGES">VOYAGES</a></h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Above the fresh ruffles of the surf<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Gaily digging and scattering.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And in answer to their treble interjections<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The sun beats lightning on the waves,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The waves fold thunder on the sand;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And could they hear me I would tell them:<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached<br></span>
+<span class="i0">By time and the elements; but there is a line<br></span>
+<span class="i0">You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The bottom of the sea is cruel.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50">{50}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;And yet this great wink of eternity,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Samite sheeted and processioned where<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Take this Sea, whose diapason knells<br></span>
+<span class="i0">On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends<br></span>
+<span class="i0">As her demeanors motion well or ill,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And onward, as bells off San Salvador<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And hasten while her penniless rich palms<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Hasten, while they are true,&mdash;sleep, death, desire,<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51">{51}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Close round one instant in one floating flower.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Bequeath us to no earthly shore until<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Is answered in the vortex of our grave<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52">{52}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Infinite consanguinity it bears&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">This tendered theme of you that light<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Retrieves from sea plains where the sky<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">While ribboned water lanes I wind<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Are laved and scattered with no stroke<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Wide from your side, whereto this hour<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And so, admitted through black swollen gates<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That must arrest all distance otherwise,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Light wrestling there incessantly with light,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Star kissing star through wave on wave unto<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Your body rocking!<br></span>
+<span class="i10">and where death, if shed,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Presumes no carnage, but this single change,&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The silken skilled transmemberment of song;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Permit me voyage, love, into your hands....<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53">{53}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Chilled albatross’s white immutability)<br></span>
+<span class="i0">No stream of greater love advancing now<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Than, singing, this mortality alone<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Through clay aflow immortally to you.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All fragrance irrefragibly, and claim<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Madly meeting logically in this hour<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And region that is ours to wreathe again,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Portending eyes and lips and making told<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The chancel port and portion of our June&mdash;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Shall they not stem and close in our own steps<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Bright staves of flowers and quills to-day as I<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54">{54}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In signature of the incarnate word<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And widening noon within your breast for gathering<br></span>
+<span class="i0">All bright insinuations that my years have caught<br></span>
+<span class="i0">For islands where must lead inviolably<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,&mdash;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In this expectant, still exclaim receive<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The secret oar and petals of all love.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55">{55}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Together in one merciless white blade&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;As if too brittle or too clear to touch!<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">One frozen trackless smile.... What words<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And changed.... “There’s<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nothing like this in the world,” you say,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Too, into that godless cleft of sky<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56">{56}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“&mdash;And never to quite understand!” No,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing so flagless as this piracy.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">But now<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.<br></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57">{57}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where icy and bright dungeons lift<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And ocean rivers, churning, shift<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Green borders under stranger skies,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Steadily as a shell secretes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Its beating leagues of monotone,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Or as many waters trough the sun’s<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O rivers mingling toward the sky<br></span>
+<span class="i0">And harbor of the phœnix’ breast&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">My eyes pressed black against the prow,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Thy derelict and blinded guest<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">I cannot claim: let thy waves rear<br></span>
+<span class="i0">More savage than the death of kings,<br></span><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58">{58}</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Some splintered garland for the seer.<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Beyond siroccos harvesting<br></span>
+<span class="i0">The solstice thunders, crept away,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Like a cliff swinging or a sail<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Flung into April’s inmost day&mdash;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Creation’s blithe and petalled word<br></span>
+<span class="i0">To the lounged goddess when she rose<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Conceding dialogue with eyes<br></span>
+<span class="i0">That smile unsearchable repose&mdash;<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,<br></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Unfolded floating dais before<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Which rainbows twine continual hair&mdash;<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!<br></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The imaged Word, it is, that holds<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Hushed willows anchored in its glow.<br></span>
+<span class="i0">It is the unbetrayable reply<br></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose accent no farewell can know.<br></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="full">
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77837 ***</div>
+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77837
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77837)