Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless.
Rotting in the wet gray air the railroad depot stands deserted under still green trees. In the fields cold begins an end.
There were other too-long-postponed departures. They left, finally, because of well water gone rank, the smell of fungus, the chill of rain in chimneys.
Traveler, your footprints are the only road, nothing else. Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk. As you walk, you make your own road, and when you look back you see the path you will never travel again.
Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears, Girdle thyself with sighing for a girth Upon the sides of mirth, Cover thy lips and eyelids, let thine ears Be filled with rumour of people sorrowing; Make thee soft raiment out of woven sighs Upon the flesh to cleave, Set pains therein and many a grievous thing, And many sorrows after each his wise For armlet and for gorget and for sleeve.
O Love's lute heard about the lands of death, Left hanged upon the trees that were therein; O Love and Time and Sin, Three singing mouths that mourn now underbreath,
(Double Portrait in a Mirror)
I
To the meeting despair of eyes in the street, offer
Your eyes on plates and your liver on skewers of pity.
When the Jericho sky is heaped with clouds which the sun
Trumpets above, respond to Apocalypse
With a headache. In spirit follow
The young men to the war, up Everest. Be shot.
The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins.
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his honor, or his grace, Or the king's real, or his stampèd face Contemplate; what you will, approve, So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who's injured by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned? Who says my tears have overflowed his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did the heats which my veins fill
the Chinaman said don’t take the hardware and gave me a steak I couldn’t cut (except the fat) and there was an ant circling the coffee cup; I left a dime tip and broke out a stick of cancer, and outside I gave an old bum who looked about the way I felt, I gave him a quarter, and then I went up to see the old man strong as steel girders, fit for bombers and blondes,
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:
When he pushed his bush of black hair off his brow: When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it in a knob behind —O act of fearful temerity! When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven, their eyes revealed: When they left the light of heaven brandished like a knife at their defenceless eyes
who goes there? who is this young man born lonely?
who walks there? who goes toward death
whistling through the water
without his chorus? without his posse? without his song?
it is autumn now
in me autumn grieves
in this carved gold of shifting faces
my eyes confess to the fatigue of living.
Of Chesterton, In the County of Huntingdon, Esquire How blessed is he, who leads a Country Life, Unvex’d with anxious Cares, and void of Strife! Who studying Peace, and shunning Civil Rage, Enjoy’d his Youth, and now enjoys his Age:
The next morning I felt that our house had been lifted away from its foundation during the night, and was now adrift, though so heavy it drew a foot or more of whatever was buoying it up, not water but something cold and thin and clear, silence riffling its surface as the house began to turn on a strengthening current,
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm. (Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence) I Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Little cullud boys with beards re-bop be-bop mop and stop.
Little cullud boys with fears, frantic, kick their CC years into flatted fifths and flatter beers that at a sudden change become sparkling Oriental wines rich and strange
Her arms around me—child— Around my head, hugging with her whole arms, Whole arms as if I were a loved and native rock, The apple in her hand—her apple and her father, and my nose pressed Hugely to the collar of her winter coat—. There in the photograph
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