Vainly my heart had with thy sorceries striven: It had no refuge from thy love,—no Heaven But in thy fatal presence;—from afar It owned thy power and trembled like a star O’erfraught with light and splendor. Could I deem How dark a shadow should obscure its beam?— Could I believe that pain could ever dwell Where thy bright presence cast its blissful spell?
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
(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.
As I was going down impassive Rivers, I no longer felt myself guided by haulers: Yelping redskins had taken them as targets And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.
The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. For view there are the houses opposite Cutting the sky with one long line of wall Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch Monotony of surface & of form Without a break to hang a guess upon. No bird can make a shadow as it flies, For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung By thickest canvass, where the golden rays Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye Or rest a little on the lap of life. All hurry on & look upon the ground, Or glance unmarking at the passers by The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages
This is how the wind shifts: Like the thoughts of an old human, Who still thinks eagerly And despairingly. The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her. The wind shifts like this:
When they confess that they have lost the penial bone and outer space is Once again a numinous void, when they’re kept out of Other Places, And Dr Fieser falls asleep at last and dreams of unburnt faces, When gold medals are won by the ton for forgetting about the different races, God Bless America.
When in the Latin shanties the scented priesthood suffers metempsychosis And with an organ entry tutti copula the dollar uncrosses
What slender youth, bedew’d with liquid odors, Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave, Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou In wreaths thy golden hair, Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he Of faith and changed gods complain, and seas Rough with black winds, and storms Unwonted shall admire! Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold, Who, always vacant, always amiable Hopes thee, of flattering gales Unmindful. Hapless they To whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me, in my vow’d Picture, the sacred wall declares to have hung My dank and dropping weeds
And in a little while we broke under the strain: suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller, though it‘s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller, like any tree in any forest. Mute, the pancake describes you. It had tiny roman numerals embedded in its rim. It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days, always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.
There is something in the sound of drum and fife
That stirs all the savage instincts into life.
In the old times of peace we went our ways,
Through proper days
Of little joys and tasks. Lonely at times,
When from the steeple sounded wedding chimes,
Telling to all the world some maid was wife—
But taking patiently our part in life
As rising from the vegetable World My Theme ascends, with equal Wing ascend, My panting Muse; and hark, how loud the Woods Invite you forth in all your gayest Trim. Lend me your Song, ye Nightingales! oh pour The mazy-running Soul of Melody Into my varied Verse! while I deduce, From the first Note the hollow Cuckoo sings,
...and a decrepit handful of trees. —Aleksandr Pushkin
And I matured in peace born of command, in the nursery of the infant century, and the voice of man was never dear to me, but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand. The burdock and the nettle I preferred, but best of all the silver willow tree. Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams; it lived here all my life, obligingly. I have outlived it now, and with surprise. There stands the stump; with foreign voices other willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies, and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.
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