And for
what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I
press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to
me, hidden in me day and night?
In the
uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in
living changingness to the light
In which
I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a
moment in the central of our being,
The vivid
transparence that you bring is peace.
Begin,
ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this
invention, this invented world,
The
inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must
become an ignorant man again
And see
the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see
it clearly in the idea of it.
Never
suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this
idea nor for that mind compose
A
voluminous master folded in his fire.
How clean
the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in
the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has
expelled us and our images . . .
The death
of one god is the death of all.
Let
purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let
Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,
Phoebus
is dead, ephebe.But Phoebus was
A name
for something that never could be named.
There was
a project for the sun and is.
There is
a project for the sun.The sun
Must bear
no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the
difficulty of what it is to be.
It is the
celestial ennui of apartments
That
sends us back to the first idea, the quick
Of this
invention; and yet so poisonous
Are the
ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth
itself, the first idea becomes
The
hermit in a poet’s metaphors,
Who comes
and goes and comes and goes all day.
May there
be an ennui of the first idea?
What
else, prodigious scholar, should there be?
The
monastic man is an artist.The
philosopher
Appoints
man’s place in music, say, today.
Bur the
priest desires.The philosopher
desires.
And no to
have is the beginning of desire.
To have
what is no is its ancient cycle.
It is
desire at the end of winter, when
It
observes the effortless weather turning blue
And sees
the myosotis on its bush.
Being
virile, it hears the calendar hymn.
It knows
that what it has is what is not
And
throws it away like a thing of another time,
As
morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.
The poem
refreshes life so that we share,
For a
moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in
an immaculate beginning
And sends
us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an
immaculate end.We move between these
points:
From that
ever-early candor to its late plural
And the
candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what
we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating
in the hear, as if blood newly came,
An
elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem,
through candor, brings back a power again
That
gives a candid kind to everything.
We say:
At night an Arabian in my room,
With his
damned hoobla-hoobla-hobbla-how,
Inscribes
a primitive astronomy
Across
the unscrawled foes the future casts
And
throws his stars around the floor.By
day
The
wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo
And still
the grossest iridescence of ocean
Howls hoo
and rises and howls hoo and fall.
Life’s
nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
The first
idea was not our own.Adam
In Eden
was the father of Descartes
And eve
made air the mirror of herself,
Of her
sons and of her daughters.They found
themselves
In heaven
as in a glass; a second earth;
And in
the earth itself they found a green—
The
inhabitants of a very varnished green.
But the
first idea was not to shape the clouds
In
imitation.The clouds preceded us.
There was
a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was
a myth before the myth began,
Venerable
and articulate and complete.
From this
the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is
not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard
it is in spire of blazoned days.
We are
the mimics.Clouds are pedagogues.
The air
is not a mirror but bare board,
Coulisse
bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro
And comic
color of the rose, in which
Abysmal
instruments make sounds like pips
Of the
sweeping meanings that we add to them.
The lion
roars at the enraging desert,
Reddens
the sand with his red-colored noise,
Defies
red emptiness to evolve his match,
Master by
foot and jaws and by the mane,
Most
supple challenger.The elephant
Breaches
the darkness of Ceylon with blares,
The glitter-goes
on surfaces of tanks,
Shattering
velvetest far-away.The bear,
The
ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain
At summer
thunder and sleeps through winter snow.
But you,
ephebe, look from your attic window,
Your
mansard with a rented piano.You lie
In
silence upon your bed.You clutch the
corner
Of the
pillow in your hand.You writhe and
press
A bitter
utterance from your writhing, dumb,
Yet
voluble of dumb violence.You look
Across
the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in
your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
These are
the heroic children whom time breeds
Against
the first idea—to lash the lion,
Caparison
elephants, teach bears to juggle.
Not to be
realized because not to
Be seen,
not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be
realized.Weather by Franz Hals,
Brushed
up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,
Wetted by
blue, colder for white.Not to
Be spoken
to, without a roof, without
First
fruits, without the virginal of birds,
The
dark-blown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.
Gay is,
gay was, the gay forsythia
And
yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.
Without a
name and nothing to be desired,
If only
imagined but imagined well.
My house
has changed a little in the sun.
The
fragrance of the magnolias come close,
False
flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.
It must
be visible or invisible,
Invisible
or visible or both:
A seeing
and unseeing in the eye.
The
weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the
weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An
abstraction blooded, as a man by though.
It feels
good as it is without the giant,
A thinker
of the first idea.Perhaps
The truth
depends on a walk around a lake,
A
composing as the body tires, a stop
To see
hepatica, a stop to watch
A
definition growing certain and
A wait within
that certainty, a rest
In the
swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps
there are times of inherent excellence,
As when
the cocks crows on the left and all
Is well,
incalculable balances,
At which
a kind of Swiss perfection comes
And a
familiar music of the machine
Sets up
its Schwarmerei, not balances
That we
achieve but balances that happen,
As a man
and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps
there are moments of awakening,
Extreme,
fortuitous, personal, in which
We more
than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an
elevation, and behold
The
academies like structures in a mist.
Can we
compose a castle-fortress-home,
Even with
the help of Viollet-le-Duc,
And see
the MacCullough there as major man?
The first
idea is an imagined thing.
The
pensive giant prone in violet space
May be
the MacCullough, an expedient,
Logos and
logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit
and a form to speak the word
And every
latent double in the word,
Beau
linguist.But the MacCullough is
MacCullough.
It does
not follow that major man is man.
If
MacCullough himself lay lounging by the sea,
Drowned
in its washes, reading in the sound,
About the
thinker of the first idea,
He might
take habit, whether from wave or phrase,
Or power
of the wave, or deepened speech,
Or a
leaner being, moving in on him,
Of
greater aptitude and apprehension,
As if the
waves at last were never broken,
As if the
language suddenly, with ease,
Said
things it had laboriously spoken.
The
romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance
Are parts
of apotheosis, appropriate
And of
its nature, the idiom thereof.
They
differ from reason’s click-clack, its applied
Enflashings.But apotheosis is not
The
origin of the major man.He comes,
Compact
in invincible foils, from reason,
Lighted
at midnight by the studious eye,
Swaddled
in revery, the object of
The hum
of thoughts evaded in the mind,
Hidden
from other thoughts, he that reposes
On a
breast forever precious for that touch,
For whom
the good of April falls tenderly,
Falls
down, the cock-birds calling at the time.
My dame,
sing for this person accurate songs.
He is and
may be but oh! He is, he is,
This
foundling of the infected past, so bright,
So moving
in the manner of his hand.
Yet look
not at his colored eyes.Give him
No
names.Dismiss him form your images.
The hot
of him is purest in the heart.
The major
abstraction is the idea of man
And major
man is its exponent, abler
In the
abstract than in his singular,
More
fecund as principle than particle,
Happy
fecundity, flor-abundant force,
In being
more than an exception, part,
Though an
heroic part, of the commonal.
The major
abstraction is the commonal,
The
inanimate, difficult visage.Who is it?
What
rabbi, grown furious with human wish,
What
chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most
miserable, most victorious,
Does not
see these separate figures one by one,
And yet
see only one, in his old coat,
His
slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,
Looking
for what was, where it used to be?
Cloudless
the morning.It is he.The man
In that
old coat, those sagging pantaloons,
It is of
him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final
elegance, not to console
Nor
sanctify, but plainly to propound.
The old
seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled
the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up
like phantoms from chronologies.
The
Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair
And these
the seraph saw, had seen long since,
In the
bandeaux of the mothers, would see again.
The bees
came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths
had never gone.We say
This
changes and that changes.Thus the
constant
Violets,
doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are
inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a
universe of inconstancy.This means
Night-blue
is an inconstant thing.The seraph
Is satyr
in Saturn, according to his thoughts.
It means
the distaste we feel for this withered scene
Is that
it has not changed enough.It remains,
It is a
repetition.The bees come booming
As if—The
pigeons clatter in the air.
An erotic
perfume, half of the body, half
Of an
obvious acid is sure what it intends
And the
booming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.
The
President ordains the bee to be
Immortal.The President ordains.But does
The body
lift its heavy wing, take up,
Again, an
inexhaustible being, rise
Over the
loftiest antagonist
To drone
the green phrases of its juvenal?
Why
should the bee recapture a lost blague,
Find a
deep echo in a horn and buzz
The
bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old?
The
President has apples on the table
And
barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The
curtains to a metaphysical t
And the
banners of the nation flutter, burst
ON the
flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack
At the
halyards.Why, then, when in golden
fury
Spring
vanishes the scraps of winter, why
Should
there be a question of returning or
Of death
in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?
This
warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing
Their
love, this beginning, not resuming, this
Booming
and booming of the new-come bee.
The great
statue of the General Du Puy
Rested
immobile, though neighboring catafalques
Bore off
the residents of its noble Place.
The
right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested
that, at the final funeral,
The music
halted and the horse stood still.
On
Sundays, lawyers in their promenades
Approached
this strongly-heightened effigy
To study
the past, and doctors, having bathed
Themselves
with care, sought out the nerveless frame
Of a
suspension, a permanence, so rigid
That it
made the General a bit absurd,
Changed
his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.
There
never had been, never could be, such
A
man.The lawyers disbelieved, the
doctors
Said that
as keen, illustrious ornament,
As a
setting for geraniums, the General,
The very
Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged
Among our
more vestigial states of mind.
Nothing
had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the
General was rubbish in the end.
Two
things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one
another, as a man depends
On a
woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real.This is the origin of change.
Winter
and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth
the particulars of rapture come.
Music
falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion
that we feel, not understand.
Morning
and afternoon are clasped together
And North
and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun
and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk
away as one in the greenest body.
In
solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not
of another solitude resounding;
A little
string speaks for a crowd of voices.
The partaker
partakes of that which changes him.
The child
that touches takes character from the thing,
The body,
it touches.The captain and his men
Are one
and the sailor and the sea are one.
Follow
after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,
Sister
and solace, brother and delight.
On a blue
island in a sky-wide water
The wild
orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long
after the planter’s death.A few limes
remained,
Where his
house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted
With
garbled green.These were the planter’s
turquoise
And his
orange blotches, these were his zero green,
A green
baked greener in the greenest sun.
These
were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in
White
sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.
There was
an island beyond him on which rested,
An island
to the South, on which rested like
A
mountain, a pine-apple pungent as Cuban summer.
And
la-bas, la-bas, the cool bananas grew,
Hung
heavily on the great banana tree,
Which
pierces clouds and bends on half the world.
He
thought often of the land from which he came,
How that
whole country was a melon, pink
If seen
rightly and yet a possible red.
An
unaffected man in a negative light
Could not
have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing
that he should leave the banjo’s twang.
Bethou
me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you,
and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in
my coppice you behold me be.
Ah,
ke!The bloody wren, the felon jay,
Ke-ke,
the jug throated robin pouring out,
Bethou,
bethou, bethou me in my glade.
There was
such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many
clappers going without bells,
That
these bethous compose a heavenly gong.
One voice
repeating, one tireless chorister,
The
phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke,
A single
text, granite monotony,
One sole
face, like a photograph of fate,
Glass-blower’s
destiny, bloodless episcopus,
Eye
without lid, mind without any dream—
These are
of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an
earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of
leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird
Of stone,
that never changes.Bethou him, you
And you,
bethou him and bethou.It is
A sound
like any other.It will end.
After a
luster of the moon, we say
We have
not the need of any paradise,
We have
not the need of any seducing hymn.
It is
true.Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy
passion, the ever-ready love
Of the
lover that lies within us and we breathe
An odor
evoking nothing, absolute.
We
encounter in the dead middle of the night
The
purple odor, the abundant bloom.
The lover
sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he
can take within him on his breath,
Possess
in his heart, conceal and nothing known.
For easy
passion and ever-ready love
Are of
our earthy birth and here and now
And where
we live and everywhere we live,
As in the
top-cloud of a May night-evening,
As in the
courage of the ignorant man,
Who
changes by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes
The book,
hot for another accessible bliss;
The
fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of
degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
On her trip
around the world, Nanzia Nunzio
Confronted
Ozymandia.She went
Alone and
like a vestal long-prepared.
I am the
spouse.She took her necklace off
And laid
it in the sand.As I am, I am
The
spouse.She opened her stone-studded
belt.
I am the
spouse, divested of bright gold,
The
spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond
the burning body that I bear.
I am the
woman stripped more nakedly
Than
nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order,
saying I am the contemplated spouse.
Speak to
me that, which spoken, will array me
In its
own only precious ornament.
Set on me
the spirit’s diamond coronal.
Clothe me
entire in the final filament,
So that I
tremble with such love so known
And
myself am precious for your perfecting.
Then
Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never
naked.A fictive covering
Weaves
always glistening form the heart and mind.
The poem
goes form the poet’s gibberish to
The
gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it
move to and fro or is it of both
At
once?Is it a luminous flattering
Or the
concentration of a cloudy day?
Is there
a poem that never reaches words
And one
that chaffers the time away?
Is the
poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a
meditation there, in which there seems
To be an
evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not
apprehended well.Does the poet
Evade us,
as in a senseless element?
Evade,
this hot, dependent orator,
The
spokesman at our bluntest barriers,
Exponent
by a form of speech, the speaker
Of a
speech only a little of the tongue?
It is the
gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries
by a peculiar speech to speak
The
peculiar potency of the general,
To
compound the imagination’s Latin with
The
lingua franca et jocundissima.
A bench
was his catalepsy, Theatre
Of
Trope.He sat in the park.The water of
The lake
was full of artificial things,
Like a page of music, like an upper air,