Alas, my Purse! how lean and low! My silken Purse! what art thou now! One I beheld—but stocks will fall— When both thy ends had wherewithal. When I within thy slender fence My fortune placed, and confidence; A poet’s fortune!—not immense: Yet, mixed with keys, and coins among,
Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose? Who can now tell what was taken, or where, or how, or whether it was received: how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over- laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around, rotted down with leafmould, accepted as civic concrete, reinforceable base cinderblocks:
(from Henry V, spoken by King Henry) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility:
(from Richard II, spoken by King Richard)
No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
I One among friends who stood above your grave I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid. It rattled on the oak like a door knocker And at that sound I saw your face beneath Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground. Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting
A Tower of Brass, one would have said, And Locks, and Bolts, and Iron Bars, Might have preserv’d one innocent Maiden-head. The jealous Father thought he well might spare All further jealous Care. And, as he walk’d, t’himself alone he smiled, To think how Venus’ Arts he had beguil’d; And when he slept, his Rest was deep: But Venus laugh’d, to see and hear him sleep: She taught the am’rous Jove A magical Receipt in Love, Which arm’d him stronger, and which help’d him more, Than all his Thunder did, and his Almightyship before.
[Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene: It is a parchment, of my rolls the fifth, Hath three skins glued together, is all Greek, And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: Lies second in the surnamed Chosen Chest, Stained and conserved with juice of terebinth, Covered with cloth of hair, and lettered Xi, From Xanthus, my wife's uncle, now at peace: Mu and Epsilon stand for my own name. I may not write it, but I make a cross To show I wait His coming, with the rest, And leave off here: beginneth Pamphylax.]
I said, "If one should wet his lips with wine, "And slip the broadest plantain-leaf we find,
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes; And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea But sad mortality o’er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
The mountains carry snow, the season fails. Jackstraw clapboard shivers on its nails, the freezing air blows maple leaves and dust, a thousand nails bleed laceries of rust, slates crack and slide away, the gutters sprout. I wonder: do a dead man’s bones come out
like these old lintels and wasp-riddled beams? I ask in simple consequence of structure seen
I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral — for you have it over a troop of artists— unless one should scour the world — you have the ground sense necessary.
See! the hearse leads. I begin with a design for a hearse. For Christ's sake not black — nor white either — and not polished! Let it be weathered — like a farm wagon — with gilt wheels (this could be applied fresh at small expense) or no wheels at all:
"You know Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains, And rising on his hands, he looks in on me Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something I should have done by daylight, and indeed, After the ground is frozen, I should have done Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
The messenger runs, not carrying the news of victory, or defeat; the messenger, unresting, has always been running, the wind before and behind him, across the turning back of earth, leaving his tracks across the plains, his ropes hanging from the ledges of mountains; for centuries, millennia, he has been running carrying whatever it is that cannot be
Fame’s pillar here at last we set, Out-during marble, brass or jet; Charmed and enchanted so As to withstand the blow O fo v e r t h r o w ; Norshalltheseas, Or o u t r a g e s Ofstorms,o’erbear What we uprear; Tho’kingdomsfall, Thispillarnevershall Declineor waste atall; Butstandfor everbyhisown Firmand well-fixed foundation.
Is dead serious about this one, having rehearsed it for two weeks they bring it right into the Odd Fellows Meeting Hall. Riding the backs of the Trojan Women, In Euripides’ great wake they are swept up,
But the women of the chorus, in black stockings and kerchiefs, Stand up bravely to it, shawled arms thrash In a foam of hysterical voices shrieking, Seaweed on the wet flanks of a whale,
Of all the rides since the birth of time, Told in story or sung in rhyme, — On Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Or one-eyed Calender’s horse of brass, Witch astride of a human back, Islam’s prophet on Al-Borák, — The strangest ride that ever was sped Was Ireson’s, out from Marblehead!
He’s brought me to hear his band. He sits in a corner mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins. Outside, through flashes of lightning, wind gusts and rain whips, knocking the lights out every five minutes. In the dark, their faces give it their all, contorted, as they play a dance tune from memory. Full of energy, my poor friend anchors them all from behind. His clarinet writhes,
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras'd And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
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