FOREWORD

Reading a poem is an experience analogous to that of encountering a person. Just as one can think and speak separately of a person’s physical appearance, his mind, and his character, so one can consider the formal aspects of a poem, its contents, and its spirit while knowing that in the latter case no less than in the former these different aspects are not really separate but an indissoluble trinity-in-unity.

We would rather that our friends were handsome than plain, intelligent than stupid, but in the last analysis it is on account of their character as persons that we accept or reject them. Similarly, in poetry we can put up with a good deal, with poems that are structurally defective, with poems that say nothing particularly new or “amusing,” with poems that are a bit crazy; but a poem that is dishonest and pretends to be something other than it is, a poem that is, as it were, so obsessed with itself that it ignores or bellows at or goes on relentlessly boring the reader, we avoid if possible. In art as in life, truthfulness is an absolute essential, good manners of enormous importance.

Every age has its characteristic faults, its typical temptation to overemphasize some virtue at the expense of others, and the typical danger for poets in our age is, perhaps, the desire to be “original.” This is natural, for who in his daydreams does not prefer to see himself as a leader rather than a follower, an explorer rather than a cultivator and a settler? Unfortunately, the possibility of realizing such a dream is limited, not only by talent but also by time, and even a superior gift cannot cancel historical priority; he who today climbs the Matterhorn, though he be the greatest climber who ever lived, must tread in Whymper’s footsteps.

Radical changes and significant novelty in artistic style can only occur when there has been a radical change in human sensibility to require them. The spectacular events of the present time must not blind us to the fact that we are living not at the beginning but in the middle of a historical epoch; they are not novel but repetitions on a vastly enlarged scale and at a violently accelerated tempo of events which took place long since.

Every poet under fifty-five cherishes, I suspect, a secret grudge against Providence for not getting him born a little earlier. On writing down the obvious names which would occur to everyone as those of the great figures in “modern” poetry, novels, painting, and music, the innovators, the creators of the new style, I find myself with a list of twenty persons: of these, four were born in the sixties, six in the seventies, and ten in the eighties. It was these men who were driven to find a new style which could cope with such changes in our civilization as, to mention only four, the collapse of the liberal hope of peaceful change, of revolution through oratory and literature; the dissolution of the traditional community by industrial urbanization; the exposure of the artist to the styles of every epoch and culture simultaneously; and the skepticism induced by psychology and anthropology as to the face value of any emotion or belief.

Before a similar crop of revolutionary artists can appear again, there will have to be just such another cultural revolution replacing these attitudes with others. So long as the way in which we regard the world and feel about our existence remains in all essentials the same as that of our predecessors we must follow in their tradition; it would be just as dishonest for us to pretend that their style is inadequate to our needs as it would have been for them to be content with the style of the Victorians.

Miss Rich, who is, I understand, twenty-one years old, displays a modesty not so common at that age, which disclaims any extraordinary vision, and a love for her medium, a determination to ensure that whatever she writes shall, at least, not be shoddily made. In a young poet, as T. S. Eliot has observed, the most promising sign is craftsmanship for it is evidence of a capacity for detachment from the self and its emotions without which no art is possible. Craftsmanship includes, of course, not only a talent for versification but also an ear and an intuitive grasp of much subtler and more difficult matters like proportion, consistency of diction and tone, and the matching of these with the subject at hand; Miss Rich’s poems rarely fail on any of these counts.

They make no attempt to conceal their family tree: “A Clock in the Square,” for instance, is confessedly related to the poetry of Robert Frost, “Design in Living Colors” to the poetry of Yeats; but what they say is not a parrotlike imitation without understanding but the expression of a genuine personal experience.

The emotions which motivate them—the historical apprehension expressed in “Storm Warnings,” the conflict between faith and doubt expressed in “For the Conjunction of Two Planets,” the feeling of isolation expressed in “By No Means Native”—are not peculiar to Miss Rich but are among the typical experiences of our time; they are none the less for that uniquely felt by her.

I suggested at the beginning of this introduction that poems are analogous to persons; the poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs: that, for a first volume, is a good deal.

W. H. Auden, 1951

STORM WARNINGS

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

AUNT JENNIFER’S TIGERS

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

VERTIGO

As for me, I distrust the commonplace;
Demand and am receiving marvels, signs,
Miracles wrought in air, acted in space
After imagination’s own designs.

The lion and the tiger pace this way
As often as I call; the flight of wings
Surprises empty air, while out of clay
The golden-gourded vine unwatered springs.

I have inhaled impossibility,
And walk at such an angle, all the stars
Have hung their carnival chains of light for me:
There is a streetcar runs from here to Mars.

I shall be seeing you, my darling, there,
Or at the burning bush in Harvard Square.

THE ULTIMATE ACT

What if the world’s corruption nears,
The consequence they dare not name?
We shall but realize our fears
And having tasted them go on,

Neither from hope of grace nor fame,
Delivered from remorse and shame,
And do the things left to be done
For no sake other than their own.

The quarry shall be stalked and won,
The bed invaded, and the game
Played till the roof comes tumbling down
And win or lose are all the same.

Action at such a pitch shall flame
Only beneath a final sun.

WHAT GHOSTS CAN SAY

When Harry Wylie saw his father’s ghost,
As bearded and immense as once in life,
Bending above his bed long after midnight,
He screamed and gripped the corner of the pillow
Till aunts came hurrying white in dressing gowns
To say it was a dream. He knew they lied.

The smell of his father’s leather riding crop
And stale tobacco stayed to prove it to him.
Why should there stay such tokens of a ghost
If not to prove it came on serious business?

His father always had meant serious business,
But never so wholly in his look and gesture
As when he beat the boy’s uncovered thighs
Calmly and resolutely, at an hour
When Harry never had been awake before.

The man who could choose that single hour of night
Had in him the ingredients of a ghost;
Mortality would quail at such a man.

An older Harry lost his childish notion
And only sometimes wondered if events
Could echo thus long after in a dream.
If so, it surely meant they had a meaning.

But why the actual punishment had fallen,
For what offense of boyhood, he could try
For years and not unearth. What ghosts can say—
Even the ghosts of fathers—comes obscurely.

What if the terror stays without the meaning?

THE KURSAAL AT INTERLAKEN

Here among tables lit with bottled tapers
The violins are tuning for the evening
Against the measured “Faites vos jeux,” the murmur,
Rising and falling, from the gaming rooms.

The waiters skim beneath the ornate rafters
Where lanterns swing like tissue-paper bubbles.
The tables fill, the bottled candles drip,
The gaming wheels spin in the long salon,
And operetta waltzes gild the air
With the capricious lilt of costume music.

You will perhaps make love to me this evening,
Dancing among the circular green tables
Or where the clockwork tinkle of the fountain
Sounds in the garden’s primly pebbled arbors.
Reality is no stronger than a waltz,
A painted lake stippled with boats and swans,
A glass of gold-brown beer, a phrase in German
Or French, or any language but our own.
Reality would call us less than friends,
And therefore more adept at making love.

What is the world, the violins seem to say,
But windows full of bears and music boxes,
Chocolate gnomes and water-color mountains,
And calendars of French and German days—
Sonntag and vendredi, unreal dimensions,
Days where we speak all languages but our own?
So in this evening of a mythical summer
We shall believe all flowers are edelweiss,
All bears hand-carved, all kisses out of time,
Caught in the spinning vertigo of a waltz.

The fringe of foam clings lacelike to your glass,
And now that midnight draws with Swiss perfection
The clock’s two hands into a single gesture,
Shall we pursue this mood into the night,
Play this charade out in the silver street
Where moonlight pours a theme by Berlioz?
If far from breath of ours, indifferent, frozen,
The mountain like a sword against the night
Catches a colder silver, draws our sight,
What is she but a local tour de force?

The air is bright with after-images.
The lanterns and the twinkling glasses dwindle,
The waltzes and the croupiers’ voices crumble,
The evening folds like a kaleidoscope.
Against the splinters of a reeling landscape
This image still pursues us into time:
Jungfrau, the legendary virgin spire,
Consumes the mind with mingled snow and fire.

RELIQUARY

The bones of saints are praised above their flesh,
That pale rejected garment of their lives
In which they walked despised, uncanonized.

Brooding upon the marble bones of time
Men read strange sanctity in lost events,
Hold requiem mass for murdered yesterdays,
And in the dust of actions once reviled
Find symbols traced, and freeze them into stone.

PURELY LOCAL

Beside this door a January tree
Answers a few days’ warmth with shoots of green;
And knowing what the winds must do, I see
A hint of something human in the scene.

No matter how the almanacs have said
Hold back, distrust a purely local May,
When did we ever learn to be afraid?
Why are we scarred with winter’s thrust today?

A VIEW OF THE TERRACE

Under the green umbrellas
Drinking golden tea,
There sit the porcelain people
Who care for you but little
And not at all for me.

The afternoon in crinkles
Lies stiffly on the lawn
And we, two furtive exiles,
Watch from an upper window
With shutters not quite drawn.

The gilt and scalloped laughter
Reaches us through a glaze,
And almost we imagine
That if we threw a pebble
The shining scene would craze.

But stones are thrown by children,
And we by now too wise
To try again to splinter
The bright enamel people
Impervious to surprise.

BY NO MEANS NATIVE

“Yonder,” they told him, “things are not the same.”
He found it understated when he came.
His tongue, in hopes to find itself at home,
Caught up the twist of every idiom.
He learned the accent and the turn of phrase,
Studied like Latin texts the local ways.
He tasted till his palate knew their shape
The country’s proudest bean, its master grape.
He never talked of fields remembered green,
Or seasons in his land of origin.

And still he felt there lay a bridgeless space
Between himself and natives of the place.
Their laughter came when his had long abated;
He struggled in allusions never stated.
The truth at last cried out to be confessed:
He must remain eternally a guest,
Never to wear the birthmark of their ways.
He could be studying native all his days
And die a kind of minor alien still.
He might deceive himself by force of will,
Feel all the sentiments and give the sign,
Yet never overstep that tenuous line.

What else then? Wear the old identity,
The mark of other birth, and when you die,
Die as an exile? it has done for some.
Others surrender, book their passage home,
Only to seek their exile soon again,
No greater strangers than their countrymen.
Yet man will have his bondage to some place;
If not, he seeks an Order, or a race.
Some join the Masons, some embrace the Church,
And if they do, it does not matter much.

As for himself, he joined the band of those
Who pick their fruit no matter where it grows,
And learn to like it sweet or like it sour
Depending on the orchard or the hour.
By no means native, yet somewhat in love
With things a native is enamored of—
Except the sense of being held and owned
By one ancestral patch of local ground.

AIR WITHOUT INCENSE

We eat this body and remain ourselves.
We drink this liquor, tasting wine, not blood.
Among these triple icons, rites of seven,
We know the feast to be of earth, not heaven:
Here man is wounded, yet we speak of God.
More than the Nazarene with him was laid
Into the tomb, and in the tomb has stayed.

Communion of no saints, mass without bell,
Air without incense, we implore at need.
There are questions to be answered, and the sky
Answers no questions, hears no litany.
We breathe the vapors of a sickened creed.
Ours are assassins deadlier than sin;
Deeper disorders starve the soul within.

If any writ could tell us, we would read.
If any ghost dared lay on us a claim,
Our fibers would respond, our nerves obey;
But revelation moves apart today
From gestures of a tired pontifical game.
We seek, where lamp and kyrie expire,
A site unscourged by wasting tongues of fire.

FOR THE FELLING OF AN ELM IN THE HARVARD YARD

They say the ground precisely swept
No longer feeds with rich decay
The roots enormous in their age
That long and deep beneath have slept.

So the great spire is overthrown,
And sharp saws have gone hurtling through
The rings that three slow centuries wore;
The second oldest elm is down.

The shade where James and Whitehead strolled
Becomes a litter on the green.
The young men pause along the paths
To see the axes glinting bold.

Watching the hewn trunk dragged away,
Some turn the symbol to their own,
And some admire the clean dispatch
With which the aged elm came down.

A CLOCK IN THE SQUARE

This handless clock stares blindly from its tower,
Refusing to acknowledge any hour.
But what can one clock do to stop the game
When others go on striking just the same?

Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,
Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,
Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing
From all the restless ways we must be going
And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,
Whether around a clockface or a world.

WHY ELSE BUT TO FORESTALL THIS HOUR

Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed
Out of the noonday sun, kept from the rain,
Swam only in familiar depths, and played
No hand where caution signaled to refrain?

For fourteen friends I walked behind the bier;
A score of cousins wilted in my sight.
I heard the steeples clang for each new year,
Then drew my shutters close against the night.

Bankruptcy fell on others like a dew;
Spendthrifts of life, they all succumbed and fled.
I did not chide them with the things I knew:
Smiling, I passed the almshouse of the dead.

I am the man who has outmisered death,
In pains and cunning laid my seasons by.
Now I must toil to win each hour and breath;
I am too full of years to reason why.

THIS BEAST, THIS ANGEL

No: this, my love, is neither you nor I.
This is the beast or angel, changing form,
The will that we are scourged and nourished by.

The golden fangs, the tall seraphic sword,
Alike unsheathed, await the midnight cry,
Blazon their answer to the stammered word.

Beneath this gaze our powers are fused as one;
We meet these eyes under the curve of night.
This is the transformation that is done

Where mortal forces slay mortality
And, towering at terrible full height,
This beast, this angel is both you and I.

EASTPORT TO BLOCK ISLAND

Along the coastal waters, signals run
In waves of caution and anxiety.
We’ll try the catboat out another day.
So Danny stands in sea-grass by the porch
To watch a heeling dinghy, lone on grey,
Grapple with moods of wind that take the bay.

One year we walked among the shipwrecked shingles
Of storm-crazed cottages along the dune.
Rosa Morelli found her husband’s boat
Ruined on the rocks; she never saw him dead,
And after seven years of stubborn hope
Began to curse the sight of things afloat.

The mother of the Kennedy boys is out
Stripping the Monday burden from the line
And looking for a rowboat round the headland.
Wonder if they stopped for bait at Mory’s
And if the old man made them understand
This is a day for boys to stay on land?

Small craft, small craft, stay in and wait for tidings.
The word comes in with every hour of wind.
News of a local violence pricks the air,
And we who have seen the kitchen blown away,
Or Harper’s children washed from sight, prepare
As usual in these parts for foul, not fair.

AT A DEATHBED IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND

I bid you cast out pity.
No more of that: let be
Impotent grief and mourning.
How shall a man break free
From this deathwatch of earth,
This world estranged from mirth?

Show me gay faces only.
I call for pride and wit—
Men who remember laughter,
Brave jesters to befit
An age that would destroy
Its last outpost of joy.

No longer condolence
And wailing on the tongue.
An old man bids you laugh;
This text I leave the young:
Your rage and loud despair
But shake a crumbling stair.

Laughter is what men learn
At seventy years or more,
Weary of being stern
Or violent as before.
Laughter to us is left
To light that darkening rift.

Where little time is with us,
Let us enact again
Not Oedipus but The Clouds.
Summon the players in.
Be proud on a sorry earth:
Bring on the men of mirth.

THE UNCLE SPEAKS IN THE DRAWING ROOM

I have seen the mob of late
Standing sullen in the square,
Gazing with a sullen stare
At window, balcony, and gate.
Some have talked in bitter tones,
Some have held and fingered stones.

These are follies that subside.
Let us consider, none the less,
Certain frailties of glass
Which, it cannot be denied,
Lead in times like these to fear
For crystal vase and chandelier.

Not that missiles will be cast;
None as yet dare lift an arm.
But the scene recalls a storm
When our grandsire stood aghast
To see his antique ruby bowl
Shivered in a thunder-roll.

Let us only bear in mind
How these treasures handed down
From a calmer age passed on
Are in the keeping of our kind.
We stand between the dead glass-blowers
And murmurings of missile-throwers.

BOUNDARY

What has happened here will do
To bite the living world in two,
Half for me and half for you.
Here at last I fix a line
Severing the world’s design
Too small to hold both yours and mine.

There’s enormity in a hair
Enough to lead men not to share
Narrow confines of a sphere
But put an ocean or a fence
Between two opposite intents.
A hair would span the difference.

FIVE O’CLOCK, BEACON HILL

Curtis and I sit drinking auburn sherry
In the receptive twilight of the vines
And potted exile shrubs with sensitive spines
Greening the glass of the conservatory.

Curtis, in sand-grey coat and tie of madder,
Meets elder values with polite negation.
I, between yew and lily, in resignation
Watch lime-green shade across his left cheek spatter.

Gazing beyond my elbow, he allows
Significance of sorts to Baudelaire.
His phrases float across the lucent air
Like exotic leaves detached from waxy boughs.

I drink old sherry and look at Curtis’ nose—
Intelligent Puritan feature, grave, discreet,
Unquestionably a nose that one might meet
In portraits of antique generalissimos.

The study seems sufficient recompense
For Curtis’ dissertations upon Gide.
What rebel breathes beneath his mask, indeed?
Avant-garde in tradition’s lineaments!

FROM A CHAPTER ON LITERATURE

After the sunlight and the fiery vision
Leading us to a place of running water,
We came into a place by water altered.
Dew ribboned from those trees, the grasses wept
And drowned in their own weeping; vacant mist
Crawled like a snail across the land, and left
A snail’s moist trace; and everything there thriving
Stared through an aqueous half-light, without mirth
And bred by languid cycles, without ardor.

There passion mildewed and corrupted slowly,
Till, feeding hourly on its own corruption,
It had forgotten fire and aspiration,
Becoming sodden with appetite alone.
There in the green-grey thickness of the air
Lived and begat cold spores of intellect,
Till giant mosses of a rimelike aspect
Hung heavily from the boughs to testify
Against all simple sensualities,
Turning them by a touch gross and discolored,
Swelling the warm taut flesh to bloated symbol
By unrelenting watery permeations.

So from promethean hopes we came this far,
This far from lands of sun and racing blood.
Behind us lay the blazing apple tree,
Behind us too the vulture and the rock—
The tragic labor and the heroic doom—
For without passion the rock also crumbles
And the wet twilight scares the bird away.

AN UNSAID WORD

She who has power to call her man
From that estranged intensity
Where his mind forages alone,
Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,
And when his thoughts to her return
Stands where he left her, still his own,
Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

MATHILDE IN NORMANDY

From the archaic ships the green and red
Invaders woven in their colored hosts
Descend to conquer. Here is the threaded headland,
The warp and woof of a tideless beach, the flight,
Recounted by slow shuttles, of swift arrows,
And the outlandish attitudes of death
In the stitched soldiery. That this should prove
More than the personal episode, more than all
The little lives sketched on the teeming loom
Was then withheld from you; self-conscious history
That writes deliberate footnotes to its action
Was not of your young epoch. For a pastime
The patient handiwork of long-sleeved ladies
Was esteemed proper when their lords abandoned
The fields and apple trees of Normandy
For harsher hunting on the opposite coast.
Yours was a time when women sat at home
To the pleasing minor airs of lute and hautbois,
While the bright sun on the expensive threads
Glowed in the long windless afternoons.

Say what you will, anxiety there too
Played havoc with the skein, and the knots came
When fingers’ occupation and mind’s attention
Grew too divergent, at the keen remembrance
Of wooden ships putting out from a long beach,
And the grey ocean dimming to a void,
And the sick strained farewells, too sharp for speech.

AT A BACH CONCERT

Coming by evening through the wintry city
We said that art is out of love with life.
Here we approach a love that is not pity.

This antique discipline, tenderly severe,
Renews belief in love yet masters feeling,
Asking of us a grace in what we bear.

Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer—
The vital union of necessity
With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

A too-compassionate art is half an art.
Only such proud restraining purity
Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.

THE RAIN OF BLOOD

In that dark year an angry rain came down
Blood-red upon the hot stones of the town.
Beneath the pelting of that liquid drought
No garden stood, no shattered stalk could sprout,
As from a sunless sky all day it rained
And men came in from streets of terror stained
With that unnatural ichor. Under night
Impatient lovers did not quench the light,
But listening heard above each other’s breath
That sound the dying heard in rooms of death.
Each loudly asked abroad, and none dared tell
What omen in that burning torrent fell.
And all night long we lay, while overhead
The drops rained down as if the heavens bled;
And every dawn we woke to hear the sound,
And all men knew that they could stanch the wound,
But each looked out and cursed the stricken town,
The guilty roofs on which the rain came down.

STEPPING BACKWARD

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I’m fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.

You asked me once, and I could give no answer,
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,
Official treacheries of face and name,
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They’re luckiest who know they’re not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler’s frenzy; you and I
Still look from separate windows every morning
Upon the same white daylight in the square.

And when we come into each other’s rooms
Once in a while, encumbered and self-conscious,
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers—
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers—
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection’s school.
No longer wandering after Plato’s ghost,
Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather.
The sourest apple makes its wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang.
Maybe we shouldn’t turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation—
If not our own, then someone’s, anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my own,
This stepping backward for another glance.
Perhaps you’ll say we need no ceremony,
Because we know each other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregular stones that fit together.
Yet still good-by, because we live by inches
And only sometimes see the full dimension.
Your stature’s one I want to memorize—
Your whole level of being, to impose
On any other comers, man or woman.
I’d ask them that they carry what they are
With your particular bearing, as you wear
The flaws that make you both yourself and human.

ITINERARY

The guidebooks play deception; oceans are
A property of mind. All maps are fiction,
All travelers come to separate frontiers.

The coast, they said, is barren; birds go over
Unlighting, in search of richer inland gardens.
No green weed thrusts its tendril from the rock face.

Visit it if you must; then turn again
To the warm pleasing air of colored towns
Where rivers wind to lace the summer valleys.

The coast is naked, sharp with cliffs, unkind,
They said; scrub-bitten. Inland there are groves
And fêtes of light and music.
But I have seen

Such denizens of enchantment print these sands
As seldom prowl the margins of old charts:
Stallions of verd antique and wild brown children
And tails of mermaids glittering through the sea!

A REVIVALIST IN BOSTON

But you shall walk the golden street,
And you unhouse and house the Lord.

Going home by lamplight across Boston Common,
We heard him tell how God had entered in him,
And now he had the Word, and nothing other
Would do but he must cry it to his brother.

We stood and listened there—to nothing new.
Yet something loosed his tongue and drove him shouting.
Compulsion’s not play-acted in a face,
And he was telling us the way to grace.

Somehow we saw the youth that he had been,
Not one to notice; an ordinary boy—
Hardly the one the Lord would make His tool—
Shuffling his feet in Baptist Sunday school.

And then transfiguration came his way;
He knew the secret all the rest were seeking.
He made the tale of Christendom his own,
And hoarsely called his brethren to the throne.

The same old way; and yet we knew he saw
The angelic hosts whose names he stumbled over.
He made us hear the ranks of shining feet
Treading to glory’s throne up Tremont Street.

THE RETURN OF THE EVENING GROSBEAKS

The birds about the house pretend to be
Penates of our domesticity.
And when the cardinal wants to play at prophet
We never tell his eminence to come off it.

The crows, too, in the dawn prognosticate
Like ministers at a funeral of state.
The pigeons in their surplices of white
Assemble for some careful Anglican rite.

Only these guests who rarely come our way
Dictate no oracles for us while they stay.
No matter what we try to make them mean
Their coming lends no answer to our scene.

We scatter seed and call them by their name,
Remembering what has changed since last they came.

THE SPRINGBOARD

Like divers, we ourselves must make the jump
That sets the taut board bounding underfoot
Clean as an axe blade driven in a stump;
But afterward what makes the body shoot
Into its pure and irresistible curve
Is of a force beyond all bodily powers.
So action takes velocity with a verve
Swifter, more sure than any will of ours.

A CHANGE OF WORLD

Fashions are changing in the sphere.
Oceans are asking wave by wave
What new shapes will be worn next year;
And the mountains, stooped and grave,
Are wondering silently range by range
What if they prove too old for the change.

The little tailors busily sitting
Flashing their shears in rival haste
Won’t spare time for a prior fitting—
In with the stitches, too late to baste.
They say the season for doubt has passed:
The changes coming are due to last.

UNSOUNDED

Mariner unpracticed,
In this chartless zone
Every navigator
Fares unwarned, alone.

Each his own Magellan
In tropics of sensation:
Not a fire-scorched stone
From prior habitation,
Not an archaic hull
Splintered on the beach.

These are latitudes revealed
Separate to each.

DESIGN IN LIVING COLORS

Embroidered in a tapestry of green
Among the textures of a threaded garden,
The gesturing lady and her paladin
Walk in a path where shade and sunlight harden
Upon the formal attitudes of trees
By no wind bent, and birds without a tune,
Against the background of a figured frieze
In an eternal summer afternoon.

So you and I in our accepted frame
Believe a casual world of bricks and flowers
And scarcely guess what symbols wander tame
Among the panels of familiar hours.
Yet should the parting boughs of green reveal
A slender unicorn with jeweled feet,
Could I persuade him at my touch to kneel
And from my fingers take what unicorns eat?

If you should pick me at my whim a rose,
Setting the birds upon the bush in flight,
How should I know what crimson meaning grows
Deep in this garden, where such birds alight?
And how should I believe, the meaning clear,
That we are children of disordered days?
That fragmentary world is mended here,
And in this air a clearer sunlight plays.

The fleeing hare, the wings that brush the tree,
All images once separate and alone,
Become the creatures of a tapestry
Miraculously stirred and made our own.
We are the denizens of a living wood
Where insight blooms anew on every bough,
And every flower emerges understood
Out of a pattern unperceived till now.

WALDEN 1950

Thoreau, lank ghost, comes back to visit Concord,
Finds the town like all towns, much the same—
A little less remote, less independent.
The cars hurl through from dawn to dawn toward Boston
Paying out speed like a lifeline between towns.
Some of them pause to look at Alcott’s house.
No farmer studies Latin now; the language
Of soil and market would confound a scholar;
And any Yankee son with lonesome notions
Would find life harder in the town today.

Under the trees by Walden Pond, the stalls
Where summer pilgrims pause beside the road,
Drown resinous night in busy rivalry
While the young make boisterous love along the shores.

He used to hear the locomotive whistle
Sound through the woods like a hawk’s restless cry.
Now the trains run through Concord night and day,
And nobody stops to listen. The ghost might smile—
The way a man in solitude would smile—
Remembering all the sounds that passed for sound
A century ago.
He would remain
Away from houses other ghosts might visit,
Not having come to tell a thing or two
Or lay a curse (what curse could frighten now?)
No tapping on the windowpane for him
Or twilight conversation in the streets
With some bewildered townsman going home.
If he had any errand, it would be
More likely curiosity of his own
About the human race, at least in Concord.
He would not come so far from distant woods
Merely to set them wondering again.

SUNDAY EVENING

We are two acquaintances on a train,
Rattling back through darkening twilight suburbs
From a weekend in the country, into town.
The station lights flare past us, and we glance
Furtively at our watches, sit upright
On leather benches in the smoke-dim car
And try to make appropriate conversation.

We come from similar streets in the same city
And have spent this same hiatus of three days
Escaping streets and lives that we have chosen.
Escape by deck chairs sprawled on evening lawns,
By citronella and by visitant moths;
Escape by sand and water in the eyes,
And sea-noise drowned in weekend conversation.

Uneasy, almost, that we meet again,
Impatient for this rattling ride to end,
We still are stricken with a dread of passing
Time, the coming loneliness of travelers
Parting in hollow stations, going home
To silent rooms in too-familiar streets
With unknown footsteps pacing overhead.

For there are things we might have talked about,
And there are signs we might have shared in common.
We look out vainly at the passing stations
As if some lamplit shed or gleaming roof
Might reawake the sign in both of us.
But this is only Rye or Darien,
And whoever we both knew there has moved away.

And I suppose there never will be time
To speak of more than this—the change in weather,
The lateness of the train on Sunday evenings—
Never enough or always too much time.
Life lurches past us like a windowed twilight
Seen from a train that halts at little junctions
Where weekend half-acquaintances say good-by.

THE INNOCENTS

They said to us, or tried to say, and failed:

With dust implicit in the uncurled green
First leaf, and all the early garden knowing
That after rose-red petals comes the bleak
Impoverished stalk, the black dejected leaf
Crumpled and dank, we should at Maytime be
Less childlike in delight, a little reserved,
A little cognizant of rooted death.

And yet beneath the flecked leaf-gilded boughs
Along the paths fern-fringed and delicate,
We supple children played at golden age,
And knelt upon the curving steps to snare
The whisking emerald lizards, or to coax
The ancestral tortoise from his onyx shell
In lemon sunlight on the balcony.
And only pedagogues and the brittle old
Existed to declare mortality,
And they were beings removed in walk and speech.
For apprehension feeds on intellect:
Uneasy ghosts in libraries are bred—
While innocent sensuality abides
In charmed perception of an hour, a day,
Ingenuous and unafraid of time.

So in the garden we were free of fear,
And what the saffron roses or the green
Imperial dragonflies above the lake
Knew about altered season, boughs despoiled,
They never murmured; and to us no matter
How in the drawing room the elders sat
Balancing teacups behind curtained glass,
While rare miraculous clocks in crystal domes
Impaled the air with splintered chips of time
Forever sounding through the tea-thin talk,
An organpoint to desperate animation.

They knew, and tried to say to us, but failed;
They knew what we would never have believed.

“HE REMEMBERETH THAT WE ARE DUST”

And when was dust a thing so rash?
Or when could dust support the lash
And stand as arrogant as stone?
And where has revelation shown
Conceit and rage so interfused
In dust, that suns have stood bemused
To watch the reckless consequence?
And when did dust break reticence
To sing aloud with all its might
In egotistical delight?
Yet when the tale is told of wind
That lifted dust and drove behind
To scoop the valleys from their sleep
And bury landscapes inches deep
Till there must follow years of rain
Before the earth could breathe again—
Or when the appetite of fire
Blazes beyond control and higher,
Then sinks into the sullen waste
Of what, devouring, it effaced,
And thinly in my palm I hold
The dust of ash grown wan and cold,
I know what element I chose
To build such anger, mould such woes.

LIFE AND LETTERS

An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city
Where here and there against the febrile sky
The shaft of an unbroken column rises,
And in the sands indifferent lizards keep
The shattered traces of old monuments.
Here where the death of the imagination
Trances the mind with shadow, here the shapes
Of tumbled arch and pediment stand out
In their last violence of illumination.

By day his valet rules him, forcing him
With milk and medicines, a deference
Cloaking the bully. “Signora X was here
During your nap; I told her doctor’s orders,
You must stay quiet and rest, keep up your strength.”
He leaves the pasteboard rectangle, engraved,
Scrawled in regretful haste, and goes his way
To join a lounging crony belowstairs.
(“The old man’s not so wide awake today.”)

The ivory body in the dressing gown
(Not the silk robe the Countess sent; he spills
His milk sometimes, and that would be a pity)
Stirs in the sinking warmth that bathes his chair
And looks on summer sunlight in the square.
Below, the fat concierge points out his window
With half-drawn blinds, to tourists who inquire.
There are a few who make the pilgrimage;
They stand and gaze and go away again.
Something to say that one has stood beneath
His window, though they never see himself.

The post brings letters stamped in foreign countries.
He holds them in his fingers, turns them over.
“He always says he means to read them later,
But I should say his reading days are finished.
All he does now is watch the square below.
He seems content enough; and I’ve no trouble.
An easy life, to watch him to his grave.”

The letters still arrive from universities,
Occasionally a charitable cause,
A favor-seeker, or an aged friend.
But now it seems no answers are expected
From one whose correspondence is collected
In two large volumes, edited with notes.
What should that timid hand beneath its sleeve
Warmed by the rich Italian sun, indite
To vindicate its final quarter-decade?
No; he has written all that can be known.
If anything, too much; his greedy art
Left no domain unpillaged, grew its breadth
From fastening on every life he touched.
(Some went to law, some smiled, some never guessed.)
But now the art has left the man to rest.

The failing searchlight of his mind remains
To throw its wavering cone of recognition
Backward upon those teeming images.
New York invades the memory again:
A million jewels crowd the boyish brain
With apprehensions of an unmastered world.
The red-haired girl waves from the Brooklyn ferry,
The bridges leap like fountains into noon.
Again the train goes rocking across-country
Past midnight platforms where the reddish light
Plays on a game of checkers through the window,
Till dawn spells snow on emptiness of plains.
Once more in San Francisco Margaret wakes
Beside him in the heat of August dark,
Still weeping from a nightmare.
So by day
He looks on summer sunlight in the square.

The grinning Bacchus trickles from his gourd
A thin bright spume of water in the basin,
While the hot tiles grow cool as evening drops
Deep cobalt from white buildings. Far in air
Buonarroti’s dome delays the gold.
The old man who has come to Rome to die
Ignores the death of still another day.
So many days have died and come to life
That time and place seem ordered by his valet;
He puts them on and off as he is told.

Now he is standing bareheaded in dusk
While fireworks rain into the sea at Biarritz,
And at his shoulder Louis Scarapin
Quotes La Fontaine. The giddy winds of fortune
Make love to him that night; and he recalls
Toasts drunk by rocketlight, and Louis’ voice
With its perpetual drawl: “Mon bon monsieur …”
Louis, who could have made the world more sane,
But killed himself instead, a Pierrot-gesture,
His face a whiteness in the dark apartment.

The bitter coffee drunk on early mornings
With Sandra’s straw hat hanging from the bedpost,
Red roses, like a bonnet by Renoir.
And the incessant tapping of her heels
Late evenings on the cobbles as they stroll:
Splinters to tingle in an old man’s brain.
Again the consumptive neighbor through the wall
Begins his evening agony of coughing
Till one is ready to scream him into silence.
And the accordion on the river steamer
Plays something from last season, foolish, gay;
Deaf ears preserve the music of a day.

Life has the final word; he cannot rule
Those floating pictures as he ruled them once,
Forcing them into form; the violent gardener,
The two-edged heart that cuts into every wound,
Reciprocates experience with art.
No more of that for now; the boughs grow wild,
The willful stems put forth undisciplined blooms,
And winds sweep through and shatter. Here at last
Anarchy of a thousand roses tangles
The fallen architecture of the mind.

FOR THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO PLANETS

We smile at astrological hopes
And leave the sky to expert men
Who do not reckon horoscopes
But painfully extend their ken
In mathematical debate
With slide and photographic plate.

And yet, protest it if we will,
Some corner of the mind retains
The medieval man, who still
Keeps watch upon those starry skeins
And drives us out of doors at night
To gaze at anagrams of light.

Whatever register or law
Is drawn in digits for these two,
Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,
Wardens of brilliance, as they do
Their dual circuit of the west—
The brightest planet and her guest.

Is any light so proudly thrust
From darkness on our lifted faces
A sign of something we can trust,
Or is it that in starry places
We see the things we long to see
In fiery iconography?