[Introduction] Lo now! four other acts upon the stage, Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age. The first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water, Unstable, supple, moist, and cold’s his Nature. The second: frolic claims his pedigree; From blood and air, for hot and moist is he. The third of fire and choler is compos’d, Vindicative, and quarrelsome dispos’d. The last, of earth and heavy melancholy, Solid, hating all lightness, and all folly. Childhood was cloth’d in white, and given to show, His spring was intermixed with some snow. Upon his head a Garland Nature set: Of Daisy, Primrose, and the Violet.
Eleven o’clock, and the curtain falls. The cold wind tears the strands of illusion; The delicate music is lost In the blare of home-going crowds And a midnight paper.
The night has grown martial; It meets us with blows and disaster. Even the stars have turned shrapnel,
Azure, ’tis I, come from Elysian shores To hear the waves break on sonorous steps, And see again the sunrise full of ships Rising from darkness upon golden oars.
My solitary arms call on the kings Whose salty beards amused my silver hands. I wept; they sang of triumphs in far lands, And gulfs fled backward upon watery wings.
Enter JANUS JANUS Chronos, Chronos, mend thy pace, An hundred times the rolling sun Around the radiant belt has run In his revolving race. Behold, behold, the goal in sight, Spread thy fans, and wing thy flight.
Enter CHRONOS, with a scythe in his hand, and a great globe on his back, which he sets down at his entrance CHRONOS Weary, weary of my weight, Let me, let me drop my freight, And leave the world behind. I could not bear
Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos; Sedjuvat, hoc precibus me tribuisse tuis. (Martial, Epigrams 12.84) What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things, I sing—This verse to Caryl, Muse! is due: This, ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view:
"With sacrifice before the rising morn Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired; And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required: Celestial pity I again implore;— Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!"
So speaking, and by fervent love endowed With faith, the Suppliant heavenward lifts her hands; While, like the sun emerging from a cloud, Her countenance brightens—and her eye expands; Her bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows; As she expects the issue in repose.
Come to your heaven, you heavenly choirs, Earth hath the heaven of your desires. Remove your dwelling to your God; A stall is now his best abode. Sith men their homage do deny, Come, angels, all their fault supply.
His chilling cold doth heat require; Come, seraphins, in lieu of fire. This little ark no cover hath; Let cherubs’ wings his body swathe. Come, Raphael, this babe must eat; Provide our little Toby meat.
Light over the Hudson recovers a Caribbean I have never seen. We list islands: Molokai, Oahu, Kauai; St. Lucia, Haiti…. The surf folds tunnels of light while a hand folds over a wrist (tell-tale pulse), counting. The long tunnel is a wrist of blown spume.
It is like a dance, I think, this silence full of questions. Pulse-beat; pulse-beat. Pulse. Pulse.
I push my hair back into the memories of palm trees,
1. Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns, But that was quite some time ago. Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs, Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant.
Moving through ivy in the park Near drying waterfalls, we open every gate; But that grave, shell-white unicorn is gone.
I saw a ship of martial build (Her standards set, her brave apparel on) Directed as by madness mere Against a stolid iceberg steer, Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down. The impact made huge ice-cubes fall Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck; But that one avalanche was all—
I sing the man that never equal knew, Whose mighty arms all Asia did subdue, Whose conquests through the spacious world do ring, That city-raser, king-destroying king, Who o’er the warlike Macedons did reign, And worthily the name of Great did gain. This is the prince (if fame you will believe, To ancient story any credit give.) Who when the globe of Earth he had subdued, With tears the easy victory pursued; Because that no more worlds there were to win, No further scene to act his glories in.
Ah that some pitying Muse would now inspire My frozen style with a poetic fire,
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
These creatures of the languid Orient,— Rare pearls of caste, in their voluptuous swoon And gilded ease, by Eunuchs watched and pent, And doomed to hear the lute’s perpetual tune, Were passion’s toys—to lust an ornament; But not such was our thrush-voiced Octoroon,— The Southland beauty who was wont to hear Faith’s tender secrets whispered in her ear.
I sit and sew—a useless task it seems, My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams— The panoply of war, the martial tred of men, Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death, Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath— But—I must sit and sew.
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral in those shires of the island where the cattle drank their pools of shadow from an older sky, surviving from when the landscape copied such subjects as “Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.” The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees, and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules
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