He preferred the brightness of bells,

  The mille fiori of vestments,

  The voice of centuries

  On the priestly gramophones.

  It was the custom

  For his rage against chaos

  To abate on the way to church,

  In regulations of his spirit.

  How good life is, on the basis of propriety,

  To be followed by a platter of capon!

  Yet he kept promising himself

  To go to Florida one of these days,

  And in one of the little arrondissements

  Of the sea there,

  To give this further thought.

  ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AT HAVANA

  I

  Canaries in the morning, orchestras

  In the afternoon, balloons at night. That is

  A difference, at least, from nightingales,

  Jehovah and the great sea-worm. The air

  Is not so elemental nor the earth

  So near.

  But the sustenance of the wilderness

  Does not sustain us in the metropoles.

  II

  Life is an old casino in a park.

  The bills of the swans are flat upon the ground.

  A most desolate wind has chilled Rouge-Fatima

  And a grand decadence settles down like cold.

  III

  The swans … Before the bills of the swans fell flat

  Upon the ground, and before the chronicle

  Of affected homage foxed so many books,

  They warded the blank waters of the lakes

  And island canopies which were entailed

  To that casino. Long before the rain

  Swept through its boarded windows and the leaves

  Filled its encrusted fountains, they arrayed

  The twilights of the mythy goober khan.

  The centuries of excellence to be

  Rose out of promise and became the sooth

  Of trombones floating in the trees.

  The toil

  Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to

  The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums

  Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.

  The indolent progressions of the swans

  Made earth come right; a peanut parody

  For peanut people.

  And serener myth

  Conceiving from its perfect plenitude,

  Lusty as June, more fruitful than the weeks

  Of ripest summer, always lingering

  To touch again the hottest bloom, to strike

  Once more the longest resonance, to cap

  The clearest woman with apt weed, to mount

  The thickest man on thickest stallion-back,

  This urgent, competent, serener myth

  Passed like a circus.

  Politic man ordained

  Imagination as the fateful sin.

  Grandmother and her basketful of pears

  Must be the crux for our compendia.

  That’s world enough, and more, if one includes

  Her daughters to the peached and ivory wench

  For whom the towers are built. The burgher’s breast,

  And not a delicate ether star-impaled,

  Must be the place for prodigy, unless

  Prodigious things are tricks. The world is not

  The bauble of the sleepless nor a word

  That should import a universal pith

  To Cuba. Jot these milky matters down.

  They nourish Jupiters. Their casual pap

  Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights

  When too great rhapsody is left annulled

  And liquorish prayer provokes new sweats: so, so:

  Life is an old casino in a wood.

  IV

  Is the function of the poet here mere sound,

  Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,

  To stuff the ear? It causes him to make

  His infinite repetition and alloys

  Of pick of ebon, pick of halcyon.

  It weights him with nice logic for the prim.

  As part of nature he is part of us.

  His rarities are ours: may they be fit

  And reconcile us to our selves in those

  True reconcilings, dark, pacific words,

  And the adroiter harmonies of their fall.

  Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier.

  The moonlight is not yellow but a white

  That silences the ever-faithful town.

  How pale and how possessed a night it is,

  How full of exhalations of the sea…

  All this is older than its oldest hymn,

  Has no more meaning than tomorrow’s bread.

  But let the poet on his balcony

  Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,

  Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.

  This may be benediction, sepulcher,

  And epitaph. It may, however, be

  An incantation that the moon defines

  By mere example opulently clear.

  And the old casino likewise may define

  An infinite incantation of our selves

  In the grand decadence of the perished swans.

  NUDITY AT THE CAPITAL

  But nakedness, woolen massa, concerns an innermost atom.

  If that remains concealed, what does the bottom matter?

  NUDITY IN THE COLONIES

  Black man, bright nouveautés leave one, at best, pseudonymous.

  Thus one is most disclosed when one is most anonymous.

  RE-STATEMENT OF ROMANCE

  The night knows nothing of the chants of night

  It is what it is as I am what I am:

  And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

  And you. Only we two may interchange

  Each in the other what each has to give.

  Only we two are one, not you and night,

  Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,

  So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,

  So far beyond the casual solitudes,

  That night is only the background of our selves,

  Supremely true each to its separate self,

  In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

  THE READER

  All night I sat reading a book,

  Sat reading as if in a book

  Of sombre pages.

  It was autumn and falling stars

  Covered the shrivelled forms

  Crouched in the moonlight.

  No lamp was burning as I read,

  A voice was mumbling, “Everything

  Falls back to coldness,

  Even the musky muscadines,

  The melons, the vermilion pears

  Of the leafless garden.”

  The sombre pages bore no print

  Except the trace of burning stars

  In the frosty heaven.

  MUD MASTER

  The muddy rivers of spring

  Are snarling

  Under muddy skies.

  The mind is muddy.

  As yet, for the mind, new banks

  Of bulging green

  Are not;

  Sky-sides of gold

  Are not.

  The mind snarls.

  Blackest of pickanines,

  There is a master of mud.

  The shaft of light

  Falling, far off, from sky to land,

  That is he—

  The peach-bud maker,

  The mud master,

  The master of the mind.

  ANGLAIS MORT À FLORENCE

  A little less returned for him each spring.

  Music began to fail him. Brahms, although

  His dark familiar, often walked apart.

  His spirit grew uncertain of delight,

  Certain of its uncertainty, in which

  That dark companion left him unconsoled

  For a self returning
mostly memory.

  Only last year he said that the naked moon

  Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

  (In the pale coherences of moon and mood

  When he was young), naked and alien,

  More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

  Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.

  He used his reason, exercised his will,

  Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

  In speech. He was that music and himself.

  They were particles of order, a single majesty:

  But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

  He stood at last by God’s help and the police;

  But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

  He yielded himself to that single majesty;

  But he remembered the time when he stood alone,

  When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,

  Before the colors deepened and grew small.

  THE PLEASURES OF MERELY CIRCULATING

  The garden flew round with the angel,

  The angel flew round with the clouds,

  And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round

  And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

  Is there any secret in skulls,

  The cattle skulls in the woods?

  Do the drummers in black hoods

  Rumble anything out of their drums?

  Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby

  Might well have been German or Spanish,

  Yet that things go round and again go round

  Has rather a classical sound.

  LIKE DECORATIONS IN A NIGGER CEMETERY

  [for Arthur Powell]

  I

  In the far South the sun of autumn is passing

  Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.

  He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,

  The worlds that were and will be, death and day.

  Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.

  His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

  II

  Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak.

  I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill.

  Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.

  III

  It was when the trees were leafless first in November

  And their blackness became apparent, that one first

  Knew the eccentric to be the base of design.

  IV

  Under the mat of frost and over the mat of clouds.

  But in between lies the sphere of my fortune

  And the fortunes of frost and of clouds,

  All alike, except for the rules of the rabbis,

  Happy men, distinguishing frost and clouds.

  V

  If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,

  The future might stop emerging out of the past,

  Out of what is full of us; yet the search

  And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

  VI

  We should die except for Death

  In his chalk and violet robes.

  Not to die a parish death.

  VII

  How easily the feelings flow this afternoon

  Over the simplest words:

  It is too cold for work, now, in the fields.

  VIII

  Out of the spirit of the holy temples,

  Empty and grandiose, let us make hymns

  And sing them in secrecy as lovers do.

  IX

  In a world of universal poverty

  The philosophers alone will be fat

  Against the autumn winds

  In an autumn that will be perpetual.

  X

  Between farewell and the absence of farewell,

  The final mercy and the final loss,

  The wind and the sudden falling of the wind.

  XI

  The cloud rose upward like a heavy stone

  That lost its heaviness through that same will,

  Which changed light green to olive then to blue.

  XII

  The sense of the serpent in you, Ananke,

  And your averted stride

  Add nothing to the horror of the frost

  That glistens on your face and hair.

  XIII

  The birds are singing in the yellow patios,

  Pecking at more lascivious rinds than ours,

  From sheer Gemütlichkeit.

  XIV

  The leaden pigeon on the entrance gate

  Must miss the symmetry of a leaden mate,

  Must see her fans of silver undulate.

  XV

  Serve the rouged fruits in early snow.

  They resemble a page of Toulet

  Read in the ruins of a new society,

  Furtively, by candle and out of need.

  XVI

  If thinking could be blown away

  Yet this remain the dwelling-place

  Of those with a sense for simple space.

  XVII

  The sun of Asia creeps above the horizon

  Into this haggard and tenuous air,

  A tiger lamed by nothingness and frost.

  XVIII

  Shall I grapple with my destroyers

  In the muscular poses of the museums?

  But my destroyers avoid the museums.

  XIX

  An opening of portals when night ends,

  A running forward, arms stretched out as drilled.

  Act I, Scene i, at a German Staats-Oper.

  XX

  Ah, but the meaningless, natural effigy!

  The revealing aberration should appear,

  The agate in the eye, the tufted ear,

  The rabbit fat, at last, in glassy grass.

  XXI

  She was a shadow as thin in memory

  As an autumn ancient underneath the snow,

  Which one recalls at a concert or in a café.

  XXII

  The comedy of hollow sounds derives

  From truth and not from satire on our lives.

  Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill.

  XXIII

  The fish are in the fishman’s window,

  The grain is in the baker’s shop,

  The hunter shouts as the pheasant falls.

  Consider the odd morphology of regret.

  XXIV

  A bridge above the bright and blue of water

  And the same bridge when the river is frozen.

  Rich Tweedle-dum, poor Tweedle-dee.

  XXV

  From oriole to crow, note the decline

  In music. Crow is realist. But, then,

  Oriole, also, may be realist.

  XXVI

  This fat pistache of Belgian grapes exceeds

  The total gala of auburn aureoles.

  Cochon! Master, the grapes are here and now.

  XXVII

  John Constable they could never quite transplant

  And our streams rejected the dim Academy.

  Granted the Picts impressed us otherwise

  In the taste for iron dogs and iron deer.

  XXVIII

  A pear should come to the table popped with juice,

  Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms

  Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

  XXIX

  Choke every ghost with acted violence,

  Stamp down the phosphorescent toes, tear off

  The spittling tissues tight across the bones.

  The heavy bells are tolling rowdy-dow.

  XXX

  The hen-cock crows at midnight and lays no egg,

  The cock-hen crows all day. But cockerel shrieks,

  Hen shudders: the copious egg is made and laid.

  XXXI

  A teeming millpond or a furious mind.

  Gray grasses rolling windily away

&nbsp
; And bristling thorn-trees spinning on the bank

  The actual is a deft beneficence.

  XXXII

  Poetry is a finikin thing of air

  That lives uncertainly and not for long

  Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

  XXXIII

  For all his purple, the purple bird must have

  Notes for his comfort that he may repeat

  Through the gross tedium of being rare.

  XXXIV

  A calm November. Sunday in the fields.

  A reflection stagnant in a stagnant stream.

  Yet invisible currents clearly circulate.

  XXXV

  Men and the affairs of men seldom concerned

  This pundit of the weather, who never ceased

  To think of man the abstraction, the comic sum.

  XXXVI

  The children will be crying on the stair,

  Half-way to bed, when the phrase will be spoken,