Best Famous beautiful Poems
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i carry your heart with me
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
|
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago
In a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that long ago
In this kingdom by the sea
A wind blew out of a cloud chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels not half so happy in heaven
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so all the night-tide I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride
In the sepulchre there by the sea
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
|
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"
Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
|
On the Pulse of Morning
(also referred to as The Rock Cries Out To Us Today)
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Mark the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spelling words
Armed for slaughter.
The rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A river sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.
Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I
And the tree and stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
And when you yet knew you still knew nothing.
The river sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing river and the wise rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the tree.
Today, the first and last of every tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river.
Each of you, descendant of some passed on
Traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name,
You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca,
You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me,
Then forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of other seekers--
Desperate for gain, starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru,
Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the tree planted by the river,
Which will not be moved.
I, the rock, I the river, I the tree
I am yours--your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me,
The rock, the river, the tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes,
Into your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
|
THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C
I
The World without Imagination
1 Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
2 The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
3 Of snails, musician of pears, principium
4 And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig
5 Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
6 Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea
7 Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.
8 An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,
9 Berries of villages, a barber's eye,
10 An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,
11 Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung
12 On porpoises, instead of apricots,
13 And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
14 Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
15 Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.
16 One eats one pat¨¦, even of salt, quotha.
17 It was not so much the lost terrestrial,
18 The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,
19 That century of wind in a single puff.
20 What counted was mythology of self,
21 Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,
22 The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,
23 The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak
24 Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw
25 Of hum, inquisitorial botanist,
26 And general lexicographer of mute
27 And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,
28 A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
29 What word split up in clickering syllables
30 And storming under multitudinous tones
31 Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?
32 Crispin was washed away by magnitude.
33 The whole of life that still remained in him
34 Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,
35 Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,
36 Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust.
37 Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,
38 The old age of a watery realist,
39 Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes
40 Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age
41 That whispered to the sun's compassion, made
42 A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,
43 And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon
44 Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that
45 Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,
46 Except in faint, memorial gesturings,
47 That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,
48 Here, something in the rise and fall of wind
49 That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,
50 A sunken voice, both of remembering
51 And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.
52 Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.
53 The valet in the tempest was annulled.
54 Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,
55 And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.
56 Crispin, merest minuscule in the gates,
57 Dejected his manner to the turbulence.
58 The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,
59 The dead brine melted in him like a dew
60 Of winter, until nothing of himself
61 Remained, except some starker, barer self
62 In a starker, barer world, in which the sun
63 Was not the sun because it never shone
64 With bland complaisance on pale parasols,
65 Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.
66 Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried
67 Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin
68 Became an introspective voyager.
69 Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,
70 Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,
71 But with a speech belched out of hoary darks
72 Noway resembling his, a visible thing,
73 And excepting negligible Triton, free
74 From the unavoidable shadow of himself
75 That lay elsewhere around him. Severance
76 Was clear. The last distortion of romance
77 Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea
78 Severs not only lands but also selves.
79 Here was no help before reality.
80 Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.
81 The imagination, here, could not evade,
82 In poems of plums, the strict austerity
83 Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.
84 The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.
85 What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?
86 Out of what swift destruction did it spring?
87 It was caparison of mind and cloud
88 And something given to make whole among
89 The ruses that were shattered by the large.
II
Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan
90 In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers
91 Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,
92 In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan
93 And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,
94 As if raspberry tanagers in palms,
95 High up in orange air, were barbarous.
96 But Crispin was too destitute to find
97 In any commonplace the sought-for aid.
98 He was a man made vivid by the sea,
99 A man come out of luminous traversing,
100 Much trumpeted, made desperately clear,
101 Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies,
102 To whom oracular rockings gave no rest.
103 Into a savage color he went on.
104 How greatly had he grown in his demesne,
105 This auditor of insects! He that saw
106 The stride of vanishing autumn in a park
107 By way of decorous melancholy; he
108 That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,
109 As dissertation of profound delight,
110 Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes,
111 Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged
112 His apprehension, made him intricate
113 In moody rucks, and difficult and strange
114 In all desires, his destitution's mark.
115 He was in this as other freemen are,
116 Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.
117 His violence was for aggrandizement
118 And not for stupor, such as music makes
119 For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived
120 That coolness for his heat came suddenly,
121 And only, in the fables that he scrawled
122 With his own quill, in its indigenous dew,
123 Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,
124 Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,
125 Green barbarism turning paradigm.
126 Crispin foresaw a curious promenade
127 Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,
128 And elemental potencies and pangs,
129 And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,
130 Making the most of savagery of palms,
131 Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom
132 That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread.
133 The fabulous and its intrinsic verse
134 Came like two spirits parlaying, adorned
135 In radiance from the Atlantic coign,
136 For Crispin and his quill to catechize.
137 But they came parlaying of such an earth,
138 So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,
139 So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled
140 Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,
141 Scenting the jungle in their refuges,
142 So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red
143 In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,
144 That earth was like a jostling festival
145 Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,
146 Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth.
147 So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found
148 A new reality in parrot-squawks.
149 Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd
150 Discoverer walked through the harbor streets
151 Inspecting the cabildo, the fa?ade
152 Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard
153 A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed,
154 Approaching like a gasconade of drums.
155 The white cabildo darkened, the fa?ade,
156 As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up
157 In swift, successive shadows, dolefully.
158 The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind,
159 Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
160 Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
161 Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
162 Gesticulating lightning, mystical,
163 Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight.
164 An annotator has his scruples, too.
165 He knelt in the cathedral with the rest,
166 This connoisseur of elemental fate,
167 Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one
168 Of many proclamations of the kind,
169 Proclaiming something harsher than he learned
170 From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights
171 Or seeing the midsummer artifice
172 Of heat upon his pane. This was the span
173 Of force, the quintessential fact, the note
174 Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,
175 The thing that makes him envious in phrase.
176 And while the torrent on the roof still droned
177 He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free
178 And more than free, elate, intent, profound
179 And studious of a self possessing him,
180 That was not in him in the crusty town
181 From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay
182 The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,
183 In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,
184 Let down gigantic quavers of its voice,
185 For Crispin to vociferate again.
III
Approaching Carolina
186 The book of moonlight is not written yet
187 Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room
188 For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,
189 Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage
190 Through sweating changes, never could forget
191 That wakefulness or meditating sleep,
192 In which the sulky strophes willingly
193 Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.
194 Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book
195 For the legendary moonlight that once burned
196 In Crispin's mind above a continent.
197 America was always north to him,
198 A northern west or western north, but north,
199 And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled
200 And lank, rising and slumping from a sea
201 Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread
202 In endless ledges, glittering, submerged
203 And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.
204 The spring came there in clinking pannicles
205 Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,
206 If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,
207 Before the winter's vacancy returned.
208 The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,
209 Was like a glacial pink upon the air.
210 The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice
211 Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,
212 Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.
213 How many poems he denied himself
214 In his observant progress, lesser things
215 Than the relentless contact he desired;
216 How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds
217 He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,
218 Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;
219 And what descants, he sent to banishment!
220 Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave
221 The liaison, the blissful liaison,
222 Between himself and his environment,
223 Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,
224 For him, and not for him alone. It seemed
225 Elusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,
226 Wrong as a divagation to Peking,
227 To him that postulated as his theme
228 The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,
229 A passionately niggling nightingale.
230 Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,
231 A minor meeting, facile, delicate.
232 Thus he conceived his voyaging to be
233 An up and down between two elements,
234 A fluctuating between sun and moon,
235 A sally into gold and crimson forms,
236 As on this voyage, out of goblinry,
237 And then retirement like a turning back
238 And sinking down to the indulgences
239 That in the moonlight have their habitude.
240 But let these backward lapses, if they would,
241 Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew
242 It was a flourishing tropic he required
243 For his refreshment, an abundant zone,
244 Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious
245 Yet with a harmony not rarefied
246 Nor fined for the inhibited instruments
247 Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed
248 Between a Carolina of old time,
249 A little juvenile, an ancient whim,
250 And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn
251 From what he saw across his vessel's prow.
252 He came. The poetic hero without palms
253 Or jugglery, without regalia.
254 And as he came he saw that it was spring,
255 A time abhorrent to the nihilist
256 Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
257 The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,
258 Although contending featly in its veils,
259 Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
260 Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
261 A sinewy nakedness. A river bore
262 The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
263 He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
264 Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
265 From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
266 Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
267 That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.
268 He savored rankness like a sensualist.
269 He marked the marshy ground around the dock,
270 The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
271 Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore.
272 It purified. It made him see how much
273 Of what he saw he never saw at all.
274 He gripped more closely the essential prose
275 As being, in a world so falsified,
276 The one integrity for him, the one
277 Discovery still possible to make,
278 To which all poems were incident, unless
279 That prose should wear a poem's guise at last.
IV
The Idea of a Colony
280 Nota: his soil is man's intelligence.
281 That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find.
282 Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare
283 His cloudy drift and planned a colony.
284 Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,
285 Rex and principium, exit the whole
286 Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose
287 More exquisite than any tumbling verse:
288 A still new continent in which to dwell.
289 What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,
290 Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind,
291 If not, when all is said, to drive away
292 The shadow of his fellows from the skies,
293 And, from their stale intelligence released,
294 To make a new intelligence prevail?
295 Hence the reverberations in the words
296 Of his first central hymns, the celebrants
297 Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength
298 Of his aesthetic, his philosophy,
299 The more invidious, the more desired.
300 The florist asking aid from cabbages,
301 The rich man going bare, the paladin
302 Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,
303 The appointed power unwielded from disdain.
304 His western voyage ended and began.
305 The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,
306 Another, still more bellicose, came on.
307 He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,
308 And, being full of the caprice, inscribed
309 Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.
310 He made a singular collation. Thus:
311 The natives of the rain are rainy men.
312 Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,
313 And April hillsides wooded white and pink,
314 Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white
315 And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.
316 And in their music showering sounds intone.
317 On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,
318 What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,
319 What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,
320 That streaking gold should speak in him
321 Or bask within his images and words?
322 If these rude instances impeach themselves
323 By force of rudeness, let the principle
324 Be plain. For application Crispin strove,
325 Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute
326 As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.
327 Upon these premises propounding, he
328 Projected a colony that should extend
329 To the dusk of a whistling south below the south.
330 A comprehensive island hemisphere.
331 The man in Georgia waking among pines
332 Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,
333 Planting his pristine cores in Florida,
334 Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,
335 But on the banjo's categorical gut,
336 Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays.
337 Sepulchral se?ors, bibbing pale mescal,
338 Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,
339 Should make the intricate Sierra scan.
340 And dark Brazilians in their caf¨¦s,
341 Musing immaculate, pampean dits,
342 Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,
343 To be their latest, lucent paramour.
344 These are the broadest instances. Crispin,
345 Progenitor of such extensive scope,
346 Was not indifferent to smart detail.
347 The melon should have apposite ritual,
348 Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,
349 When its black branches came to bud, belle day,
350 Should have an incantation. And again,
351 When piled on salvers its aroma steeped
352 The summer, it should have a sacrament
353 And celebration. Shrewd novitiates
354 Should be the clerks of our experience.
355 These bland excursions into time to come,
356 Related in romance to backward flights,
357 However prodigal, however proud,
358 Contained in their afflatus the reproach
359 That first drove Crispin to his wandering.
360 He could not be content with counterfeit,
361 With masquerade of thought, with hapless words
362 That must belie the racking masquerade,
363 With fictive flourishes that preordained
364 His passion's permit, hang of coat, degree
365 Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash
366 Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.
367 It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,
368 Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served
369 Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,
370 A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.
371 There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
372 That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
373 Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
374 The oncoming fantasies of better birth.
375 The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed
376 Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.
377 All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.
378 But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.
379 Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,
380 With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?
381 No, no: veracious page on page, exact.
V
A Nice Shady Home
382 Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,
383 Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent
384 Had kept him still the pricking realist,
385 Choosing his element from droll confect
386 Of was and is and shall or ought to be,
387 Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far
388 Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come
389 To colonize his polar planterdom
390 And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.
391 But his emprize to that idea soon sped.
392 Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there
393 Slid from his continent by slow recess
394 To things within his actual eye, alert
395 To the difficulty of rebellious thought
396 When the sky is blue. The blue infected will.
397 It may be that the yarrow in his fields
398 Sealed pensive purple under its concern.
399 But day by day, now this thing and now that
400 Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned,
401 Little by little, as if the suzerain soil
402 Abashed him by carouse to humble yet
403 Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement.
404 He first, as realist, admitted that
405 Whoever hunts a matinal continent
406 May, after all, stop short before a plum
407 And be content and still be realist.
408 The words of things entangle and confuse.
409 The plum survives its poems. It may hang
410 In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground
411 Obliquities of those who pass beneath,
412 Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved
413 In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,
414 Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.
415 So Crispin hasped on the surviving form,
416 For him, of shall or ought to be in is.
417 Was he to bray this in profoundest brass
418 Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?
419 Was he to company vastest things defunct
420 With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?
421 Scrawl a tragedian's testament? Prolong
422 His active force in an inactive dirge,
423 Which, let the tall musicians call and call,
424 Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen
425 Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?
426 Because he built a cabin who once planned
427 Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?
428 Because he turned to salad-beds again?
429 Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?
430 Should he lay by the personal and make
431 Of his own fate an instance of all fate?
432 What is one man among so many men?
433 What are so many men in such a world?
434 Can one man think one thing and think it long?
435 Can one man be one thing and be it long?
436 The very man despising honest quilts
437 Lies quilted to his poll in his despite.
438 For realists, what is is what should be.
439 And so it came, his cabin shuffled up,
440 His trees were planted, his duenna brought
441 Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,
442 The curtains flittered and the door was closed.
443 Crispin, magister of a single room,
444 Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down
445 It was as if the solitude concealed
446 And covered him and his congenial sleep.
447 So deep a sound fell down it grew to be
448 A long soothsaying silence down and down.
449 The crickets beat their tambours in the wind,
450 Marching a motionless march, custodians.
451 In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,
452 Each day, still curious, but in a round
453 Less prickly and much more condign than that
454 He once thought necessary. Like Candide,
455 Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,
456 And cream for the fig and silver for the cream,
457 A blonde to tip the silver and to taste
458 The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be
459 Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries!
460 Yet the quotidian saps philosophers
461 And men like Crispin like them in intent,
462 If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.
463 But the quotidian composed as his,
464 Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,
465 The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,
466 Although the rose was not the noble thorn
467 Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,
468 Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung
469 Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights
470 In which those frail custodians watched,
471 Indifferent to the tepid summer cold,
472 While he poured out upon the lips of her
473 That lay beside him, the quotidian
474 Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.
475 For all it takes it gives a humped return
476 Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.
VI
And Daughters with Curls
477 Portentous enunciation, syllable
478 To blessed syllable affined, and sound
479 Bubbling felicity in cantilene,
480 Prolific and tormenting tenderness
481 Of music, as it comes to unison,
482 Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last
483 Deduction. Thrum, with a proud douceur
484 His grand pronunciamento and devise.
485 The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,
486 Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,
487 Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,
488 Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.
489 The return to social nature, once begun,
490 Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,
491 Involved him in midwifery so dense
492 His cabin counted as phylactery,
493 Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt
494 Of children nibbling at the sugared void,
495 Infants yet eminently old, then dome
496 And halidom for the unbraided femes,
497 Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,
498 Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,
499 True daughters both of Crispin and his clay.
500 All this with many mulctings of the man,
501 Effective colonizer sharply stopped
502 In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.
503 But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs
504 Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints
505 Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex
506 The stopper to indulgent fatalist
507 Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon
508 His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,
509 She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,
510 So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,
511 Attentive to a coronal of things
512 Secret and singular. Second, upon
513 A second similar counterpart, a maid
514 Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake
515 Excepting to the motherly footstep, but
516 Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.
517 Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,
518 A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,
519 Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,
520 All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.
521 A few years more and the vermeil capuchin
522 Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,
523 The dulcet omen fit for such a house.
524 The second sister dallying was shy
525 To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself
526 Out of her botches, hot embosomer.
527 The third one gaping at the orioles
528 Lettered herself demurely as became
529 A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.
530 The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.
531 Four daughters in a world too intricate
532 In the beginning, four blithe instruments
533 Of differing struts, four voices several
534 In couch, four more person?, intimate
535 As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue
536 That should be silver, four accustomed seeds
537 Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights
538 That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,
539 Four questioners and four sure answerers.
540 Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.
541 The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,
542 Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out
543 Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,
544 And sown again by the stiffest realist,
545 Came reproduced in purple, family font,
546 The same insoluble lump. The fatalist
547 Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,
548 Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote
549 Invented for its pith, not doctrinal
550 In form though in design, as Crispin willed,
551 Disguised pronunciamento, summary,
552 Autumn's compendium, strident in itself
553 But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved
554 In those portentous accents, syllables,
555 And sounds of music coming to accord
556 Upon his law, like their inherent sphere,
557 Seraphic proclamations of the pure
558 Delivered with a deluging onwardness.
559 Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote
560 Is false, if Crispin is a profitless
561 Philosopher, beginning with green brag,
562 Concluding fadedly, if as a man
563 Prone to distemper he abates in taste,
564 Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,
565 Glozing his life with after-shining flicks,
566 Illuminating, from a fancy gorged
567 By apparition, plain and common things,
568 Sequestering the fluster from the year,
569 Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,
570 And so distorting, proving what he proves
571 Is nothing, what can all this matter since
572 The relation comes, benignly, to its end?
573 So may the relation of each man be clipped.
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Daddy
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
(1962)
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I Am Not Yours
I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.
You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.
Oh plunge me deep in love - put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.
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My Lost Youth
OFTEN I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town,
And my youth comes back to me. 5
And a verse of a Lapland song
Is haunting my memory still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
I can see the shadowy lines of its trees, 10
And catch, in sudden gleams,
The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,
And islands that were the Hesperides
Of all my boyish dreams.
And the burden of that old song, 15
It murmurs and whispers still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tides tossing free; 20
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.
And the voice of that wayward song
Is singing and saying still: 25
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
I remember the bulwarks by the shore,
And the fort upon the hill;
The sunrise gun, with its hollow roar, 30
The drum-beat repeated o'er and o'er,
And the bugle wild and shrill.
And the music of that old song
Throbs in my memory still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will, 35
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thundered o'er the tide!
And the dead captains, as they lay
In their graves, o'erlooking the tranquil bay, 40
Where they in battle died.
And the sound of that mournful song
Goes through me with a thrill:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 45
I can see the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering's Woods;
And the friendships old and the early loves
Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves
In quiet neighborhoods. 50
And the verse of that sweet old song,
It flutters and murmurs still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
I remember the gleams and glooms that dart 55
Across the school-boy's brain;
The song and the silence in the heart,
That in part are prophecies, and in part
Are longings wild and vain.
And the voice of that fitful song 60
Sings on, and is never still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die; 65
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.
And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill: 70
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
Strange to me now are the forms I meet
When I visit the dear old town;
But the native air is pure and sweet, 75
And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,
Are singing the beautiful song,
Are sighing and whispering still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will, 80
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair,
And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there,
And among the dreams of the days that were, 85
I find my lost youth again.
And the strange and beautiful song,
The groves are repeating it still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 90
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Berck-Plage
(1)
This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.
How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation.
Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.
Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
I have two legs, and I move smilingly..
A sandy damper kills the vibrations;
It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices
Waving and crutchless, half their old size.
The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,
Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.
Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?
Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?
Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers
Who wall up their backs against him.
They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body.
The sea, that crystallized these,
Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress.
(2)
This black boot has no mercy for anybody.
Why should it, it is the hearse of a dad foot,
The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest
Who plumbs the well of his book,
The bent print bulging before him like scenery.
Obscene bikinis hid in the dunes,
Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugar
Of little crystals, titillating the light,
While a green pool opens its eye,
Sick with what it has swallowed----
Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers
Two lovers unstick themselves.
O white sea-crockery,
What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat....
And the onlooker, trembling,
Drawn like a long material
Through a still virulence,
And a weed, hairy as privates.
(3)
On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Things, things----
Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.
Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk
Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?
I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
I am not a smile.
These children are after something, with hooks and cries,
And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.
This is the side of a man: his red ribs,
The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon:
One mirrory eye----
A facet of knowledge.
On a striped mattress in one room
An old man is vanishing.
There is no help in his weeping wife.
Where are the eye-stones, yellow and vvaluable,
And the tongue, sapphire of ash.
(4)
A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.
How superior he is now.
It is like possessing a saint.
The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;
They are browning, like touched gardenias.
The bed is rolled from the wall.
This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit
Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak
Rises so whitely unbuffeted?
They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened
And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.
Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,
The pillow cases are sweetening.
It is a blessing, it is a blessing:
The long coffin of soap-colored oak,
The curious bearers and the raw date
Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.
(5)
The gray sky lowers, the hills like a green sea
Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,
The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife----
Blunt, practical boats
Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.
In the parlor of the stone house
One curtain is flickering from the open window,
Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.
This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.
How far he is now, his actions
Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor.
As the pallors gather----
The pallors of hands and neighborly faces,
The elate pallors of flying iris.
They are flying off into nothing: remember us.
The empty benches of memory look over stones,
Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.
It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.
(6)
The natural fatness of these lime leaves!----
Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.
The voice of the priest, in thin air,
Meets the corpse at the gate,
Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;
A glittler of wheat and crude earth.
What is the name of that color?----
Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,
Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.
The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,
Necessary among the flowers,
Enfolds her lace like fine linen,
Not to be spread again.
While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,
Passes cloud after cloud.
And the bride flowers expend a fershness,
And the soul is a bride
In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.
(7)
Behind the glass of this car
The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.
And I am dark-suited and stil, a member of the party,
Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.
And the priest is a vessel,
A tarred fabric,sorry and dull,
Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,
A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips
Storming the hilltop.
Then, from the barred yard, the children
Smell the melt of shoe-blacking,
Their faces turning, wordless and slow,
Their eyes opening
On a wonderful thing----
Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood,
And a naked mouth, red and awkward.
For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
There is no hope, it is given up.
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The Recollection
NOW the last day of many days,
All beautiful and bright as thou,
The loveliest and the last, is dead:
Rise, Memory, and write its praise!
Up¡ªto thy wonted work! come, trace 5
The epitaph of glory fled,
For now the earth has changed its face,
A frown is on the heaven's brow.
We wander'd to the Pine Forest
That skirts the ocean's foam. 10
The lightest wind was in its nest,
The tempest in its home;
The whispering waves were half asleep,
The clouds were gone to play,
And on the bosom of the deep 15
The smile of heaven lay:
It seem'd as if the hour were one
Sent from beyond the skies
Which scatter'd from above the sun
A light of Paradise! 20
We paused amid the pines that stood
The giants of the waste,
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude
As serpents interlaced,¡ª
And soothed by every azure breath 25
That under heaven is blown,
To harmonies and hues beneath,
As tender as its own.
Now all the tree-tops lay asleep
Like green waves on the sea, 30
As still as in the silent deep
The ocean-woods may be.
How calm it was!¡ªThe silence there
By such a chain was bound,
That even the busy woodpecker 35
Made stiller by her sound
The inviolable quietness;
The breath of peace we drew
With its soft motion made not less
The calm that round us grew. 40
There seem'd, from the remotest seat
Of the wide mountain waste
To the soft flower beneath our feet,
A magic circle traced,¡ª
A spirit interfused around 45
A thrilling silent life;
To momentary peace it bound
Our mortal nature's strife;¡ª
And still I felt the centre of
The magic circle there 50
Was one fair form that fill'd with love
The lifeless atmosphere.
We paused beside the pools that lie
Under the forest bough;
Each seem'd as 'twere a little sky 55
Gulf'd in a world below¡ª
A firmament of purple light
Which in the dark earth lay,
More boundless than the depth of night
And purer than the day¡ª 60
In which the lovely forests grew
As in the upper air,
More perfect both in shape and hue
Than any spreading there.
There lay the glade and neighbouring lawn, 65
And through the dark-green wood
The white sun twinkling like the dawn
Out of a speckled cloud.
Sweet views which in our world above
Can never well be seen 70
Were imaged in the water's love
Of that fair forest green;
And all was interfused beneath
With an Elysian glow,
An atmosphere without a breath, 75
A softer day below.
Like one beloved, the scene had lent
To the dark water's breast
Its every leaf and lineament
With more than truth exprest; 80
Until an envious wind crept by,
Like an unwelcome thought
Which from the mind's too faithful eye
Blots one dear image out.
¡ªThough thou art ever fair and kind, 85
The forests ever green,
Less oft is peace in Shelley's mind
Than calm in waters seen!
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