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diff --git a/77837-0.txt b/77837-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1042982 --- /dev/null +++ b/77837-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1368 @@ +*** 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 *** |