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Title: White buildings
Author: Hart Crane
Contributor: Allen Tate
Release date: February 2, 2026 [eBook #77837]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: Boni & Liveright, 1926
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE BUILDINGS ***
White Buildings:
Poems by Hart Crane
_With a Foreword by_
ALLEN TATE
[Illustration]
BONI & LIVERIGHT, 1926
COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration]
To
WALDO FRANK
Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avançant.
-RIMBAUD.
Certain of these poems have appeared
in the following magazines: _Broom_,
_The Dial_, _Double Dealer_, _Fugitive_,
_Little Review_, _1924_, _Poetry_, _Secession_,
and _The Calendar_ (London).
FOREWORD
The poetry of Hart Crane is ambitious. It is the only poetry I am
acquainted with which is at once contemporary and in the grand manner.
It is an American poetry. Crane’s themes are abstractly, metaphysically
conceived, but they are definitely confined to an experience of the
American scene. In such poems as The Wine Menagerie, For the Marriage of
Faustus and Helen, Recitative, he is the poet of the complex urban
civilization of his age: precision, abstraction, power. There is no
_pastiche_; when he employs symbols from traditional literature, the
intention is personally symbolic; it is never falsely pretentious with
the common baggage of poetical speech, the properties coveted by the
vulgar as inherently poetic.
Hart Crane’s first experiments in verse are not, of course, collected in
this volume, which contains with one or two exceptions only those poems
exhibiting the qualities likely to be permanent in his work. Of these
exceptions there is the perfectly written piece of Imagism, Garden
Abstract. This poem evinces several properties of the “new poetry” of a
decade ago, the merits and the limitations of the Imagists. To the
Imagists Crane doubtless went to school in poetry. He learned their
structural economy; he followed their rejection of the worn-out poetic
phrase; he must have studied the experiments in rhythm of Pound,
Aldington, Fletcher. From Pound and Eliot he got his first conception of
what it is, in the complete sense, to be contemporary.
But Crane suddenly and profoundly broke with the methods of Imagism,
with its decorative and fragmentary world. To the conceptual mind a
world set up not by inclusive assertion but by exclusive attention to
the objects of sense lacks imaginative coördination; a method which
refuses to exceed the dry presentation of _petites sensations_ confines
the creative vision to suggestions, to implicit indications, but it
cannot arrive at the direct affirmation, of a complete world. A series
of Imagistic poems is a series of worlds. The poems of Hart Crane are
facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single
evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form
of its realization.
The poet who tries to release the imagination as an integer of
perception attempts the solution of the leading contemporary problem of
his art. It would be impertinent to enumerate here the underlying causes
of the dissociation of the modern consciousness: the poet no longer
apprehends his world as a Whole. The dissociation appears decisively for
the first time in Baudelaire. It is the separation of vision and
subject; since Baudelaire’s time poets have in some sense been deficient
in the one or the other. For the revolt of Rimbaud, in this distinction,
was a repudiation of the commonly available themes of poetry, followed
by a steady attenuation of vision in the absence of thematic control.
Exactly to the extent to which the ready-pmade theme controls the
vision, the vision is restricted by tradition and may, to that extent,
be defined by tradition. In The Waste Land, which revives the essence of
the problem, Mr. Eliot displays vision and subject once more in
traditional schemes; the vision for some reason is dissipated, and the
subject dead. For while Mr. Eliot might have written a more ambitiously
unified poem, the unity would have been false; tradition as unity is not
contemporary. The important contemporary poet has the rapidly
diminishing privilege of reorganizing the subjects of the past. He must
construct and assimilate his own subjects. Dante had only to assimilate
his.
If the energy of Crane’s vision never quite reaches a sustained maximum,
it is because he has not found a suitable theme. To realize even
partially, at the present time, the maximum of poetic energy
demonstrates an important intention. Crane’s poems are a fresh vision of
the world, so intensely personalized in a new creative language that
only the strictest and most unprepossessed effort of attention can take
it in. Until vision and subject completely fuse, the poems will be
difficult. The comprehensiveness and lucidity of any poetry, the
capacity for poetry being assumed as proved, are in direct proportion to
the availability of a comprehensive and perfectly articulated given
theme.
Crane wields a sonorous rhetoric that takes the reader to Marlowe and
the Elizabethans. His blank verse, the most sustained medium he
controls, is pre-Websterian; it is measured, richly textured,
rhetorical. But his spiritual allegiances are outside the English
tradition. Melville and Whitman are his avowed masters. In his sea
poems, Voyages, in Emblems of Conduct, in allusions to the sea
throughout his work, there is something of Melville’s intense,
transcendental brooding on the mystery of the “high interiors of the
sea.” I do not know whether he has mastered Poe’s criticism, yet some of
his conviction that the poet should be intensely local must stem from
Poe. Most of it, however, he undoubtedly gets from Whitman. Whitman’s
range was possible in an America of prophecy; Crane’s America is
materially the same, but it approaches a balance of forces; it is a
realization; and the poet, confronted with a complex present experience,
gains in intensity what he loses in range. The great proportions of the
myth have collapsed in its reality. Crane’s poetry is a concentration of
certain phases of the Whitman substance, the fragments of the myth.
The great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader is the style.
It is possible that his style may check the immediate currency of the
most distinguished American poetry of the age, for there has been very
little preparation in America for a difficult poetry; the Imagistic
impressionism of the last ten years has not supplied it. Although Crane
is probably not a critical and systematic reader of foreign literatures,
his French is better than Whitman’s; he may have learned something from
Laforgue and, particularly, Rimbaud; or something of these poets from
Miss Sitwell, Mr. Wallace Stevens, or Mr. T. S. Eliot.
He shares with Rimbaud the device of oblique presentation of theme. The
theme never appears in explicit statement. It is formulated through a
series of complex metaphors which defy a paraphrasing of the sense into
an equivalent prose. The reader is plunged into a strangely unfamiliar
_milieu_ of sensation, and the principle of its organization is not
immediately grasped. The _logical_ meaning can never be derived (see
Passage, Lachrymae Christi); but the _poetical_ meaning is a direct
intuition, realized prior to an explicit knowledge of the subject-matter
of the poem. The poem does not _convey_; it _presents_; it is not
topical, but expressive.
There is the opinion abroad that Crane’s poetry is, in some indefinite
sense, “new.” It is likely to be appropriated by one of the several
esoteric cults of the American soul. It tends toward the formation of a
state of mind, the critical equivalent of which would be in effect an
exposure of the confusion and irrelevance of the current journalism of
poetry, and of how far behind the creative impulse the critical
intelligence, at the moment, lags. It is to be hoped, therefore, that
this state of mind, where it may be registered at all, will not at its
outset be shunted into a false context of obscure religious values, that
a barrier will not be erected between it and the rational order of
criticism. For, unless the present critic is deceived as to the
structure of his tradition, the well-meaning criticism since Poe has
supported a vicious confusion: it has transferred the states of mind of
poetry from their proper contexts to the alien contexts of moral and
social aspiration. The moral emphasis is valid; but its focus on the
consequences of the state of mind, instead of on its properties as art,
has throttled a tradition in poetry. The moral values of literature
should derive from literature, not from the personal values of the
critic; their public circulation in criticism, if they are not
ultimately to be rendered inimical to literature, should be controlled
by the literary intention. There have been poetries of “genius” in
America, but each of these as poetry has been scattered, and converted
into an _impasse_ to further extensions of the same order of
imagination.
A living art is new; it is old. The formula which I have contrived in
elucidation of Crane’s difficulty for the reader (a thankless task,
since the difficulty inheres equally in him) is a formula for most
romantic poetry. Shelley could not have been influenced by Rimbaud, but
he wrote this “difficult” verse:
_Pinnacled dim in the intense inane._
The present faults of Crane’s poetry (it has its faults: it is not the
purpose of this Foreword to disguise them) cannot be isolated in a
line-by-line recognition of his difficulty. If the poems are sometimes
obscure, the obscurity is structural and deeper. His faults, as I have
indicated, lie in the occasional failure of meeting between vision and
subject. The vision often strains and overreaches the theme. This fault,
common among ambitious poets since Baudelaire, is not unique with them.
It appears whenever the existing poetic order no longer supports the
imagination. It appeared in the eighteenth century with the poetry of
William Blake.
ALLEN TATE.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD, _by Allen Tate_ xi
LEGEND 3
BLACK TAMBOURINE 5
EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT 6
MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS 7
SUNDAY MORNING APPLES 9
PRAISE FOR AN URN 11
GARDEN ABSTRACT 13
STARK MAJOR 14
CHAPLINEQSUE 16
PASTORALE 18
IN SHADOW 19
THE FERNERY 20
NORTH LABRADOR 21
REPOSE OF RIVERS 22
PARAPHRASE 24
POSSESSIONS 25
LACHRYMAE CHRISTI 27
PASSAGE 30
THE WINE MENAGERIE 32
RECITATIVE 35
FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN 37
AT MELVILLE’S TOMB 45
VOYAGES, I, II, III, IV, V, VI 49
_White Buildings_
WHITE BUILDINGS
LEGEND
As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by....
I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are,--
The only worth all granting.
It is to be learned--
This cleaving and this burning,
But only by the one who
Spends out himself again.
Twice and twice
(Again the smoking souvenir,
Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
Until the bright logic is won
Unwhispering as a mirror
Is believed.
Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,--
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.
BLACK TAMBOURINE
The interests of a black man in a cellar
Mark tardy judgment on the world’s closed door.
Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,
And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.
Æsop, driven to pondering, found
Heaven with the tortoise and the hare;
Fox brush and sow ear top his grave
And mingling incantations on the air.
The black man, forlorn in the cellar,
Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies,
Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall,
And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.
EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT
By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched
The uneven valley graves. While the apostle gave
Alms to the meek the volcano burst
With sulphur and aureate rocks ...
For joy rides in stupendous coverings
Luring the living into spiritual gates.
Orators follow the universe
And radio the complete laws to the people.
The apostle conveys thought through discipline.
Bowls and cups fill historians with adorations,--
Dull lips commemorating spiritual gates.
The wanderer later chose this spot of rest
Where marble clouds support the sea
And where was finally borne a chosen hero.
By that time summer and smoke were past.
Dolphins still played, arching the horizons,
But only to build memories of spiritual gates.
MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS
There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
“Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?”
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
SUNDAY MORNING APPLES
_To William Sommer_
The leaves will fall again sometime and fill
The fleece of nature with those purposes
That are your rich and faithful strength of line.
But now there are challenges to spring
In that ripe nude with head
reared
Into a realm of swords, her purple shadow
Bursting on the winter of the world
From whiteness that cries defiance to the snow.
A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling
Spontaneities that form their independent orbits,
Their own perennials of light
In the valley where you live
(called Brandywine).
I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets,--
Beloved apples of seasonable madness
That feed your inquiries with aerial wine.
Put them again beside a pitcher with a knife,
And poise them full and ready for explosion--
The apples, Bill, the apples!
PRAISE FOR AN URN
_In Memoriam: Ernest Nelson_
It was a kind and northern face
That mingled in such exile guise
The everlasting eyes of Pierrot
And, of Gargantua, the laughter.
His thoughts, delivered to me
From the white coverlet and pillow,
I see now, were inheritances--
Delicate riders of the storm.
The slant moon on the slanting hill
Once moved us toward presentiments
Of what the dead keep, living still,
And such assessments of the soul
As, perched in the crematory lobby,
The insistent clock commented on,
Touching as well upon our praise
Of glories proper to the time.
Still, having in mind gold hair,
I cannot see that broken brow
And miss the dry sound of bees
Stretching across a lucid space.
Scatter these well-meant idioms
Into the smoky spring that fills
The suburbs, where they will be lost.
They are no trophies of the sun.
GARDEN ABSTRACT
The apple on its bough is her desire,--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.
And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
STARK MAJOR
The lover’s death, how regular
With lifting spring and starker
Vestiges of the sun that somehow
Filter in to us before we waken.
Not yet is there that heat and sober
Vivisection of more clamant air
That hands joined in the dark will answer
After the daily circuits of its glare.
It is the time of sundering ...
Beneath the green silk counterpane
Her mound of undelivered life
Lies cool upon her--not yet pain.
And she will wake before you pass,
Scarcely aloud, beyond her door,
And every third step down the stair
Until you reach the muffled floor--
Will laugh and call your name; while you
Still answering her faint good-byes,
Will find the street, only to look
At doors and stone with broken eyes.
Walk now, and note the lover’s death.
Henceforth her memory is more
Than yours, in cries, in ecstasies
You cannot ever reach to share.
CHAPLINESQUE
We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.
For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.
We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!
And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
PASTORALE
No more violets,
And the year
Broken into smoky panels.
What woods remember now
Her calls, her enthusiasms.
That ritual of sap and leaves
The sun drew out,
Ends in this latter muffled
Bronze and brass. The wind
Takes rein.
If, dusty, I bear
An image beyond this
Already fallen harvest,
I can only query, “Fool--
Have you remembered too long;
Or was there too little said
For ease or resolution--
Summer scarcely begun
And violets,
A few picked, the rest dead?”
IN SHADOW
Out in the late amber afternoon,
Confused among chrysanthemums,
Her parasol, a pale balloon,
Like a waiting moon, in shadow swims.
Her furtive lace and misty hair
Over the garden dial distill
The sunlight,--then withdrawing, wear
Again the shadows at her will.
Gently yet suddenly, the sheen
Of stars inwraps her parasol.
She hears my step behind the green
Twilight, stiller than shadows, fall.
“Come, it is too late,--too late
To risk alone the light’s decline:
Nor has the evening long to wait,”--
But her own words are night’s and mine.
THE FERNERY
The lights that travel on her spectacles
Seldom, now, meet a mirror in her eyes.
But turning, as you may chance to lift a shade
Beside her and her fernery, is to follow
The zigzags fast around dry lips composed
To darkness through a wreath of sudden pain.
--So, while fresh sunlight splinters humid green
I have known myself a nephew to confusions
That sometimes take up residence and reign
In crowns less grey--O merciless tidy hair!
NORTH LABRADOR
A land of leaning ice
Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,
Flings itself silently
Into eternity.
“Has no one come here to win you,
Or left you with the faintest blush
Upon your glittering breasts?
Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?”
Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments
That journey toward no Spring--
No birth, no death, no time nor sun
In answer.
REPOSE OF RIVERS
The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.
Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noon’s
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder....
How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled--
I remember now its singing willow rim.
And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
After the city that I finally passed
With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
The monsoon cut across the delta
At gulf gates.... There, beyond the dykes
I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound.
PARAPHRASE
Of a steady winking beat between
Systole, diastole spokes-of-a-wheel
One rushing from the bed at night
May find the record wedged in his soul.
Above the feet the clever sheets
Lie guard upon the integers of life:
For what skims in between uncurls the toe,
Involves the hands in purposeless repose.
But from its bracket how can the tongue tell
When systematic morn shall sometime flood
The pillow--how desperate is the light
That shall not rouse, how faint the crow’s cavil
As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze,
Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already
Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase
Among bruised roses on the papered wall.
POSSESSIONS
Witness now this trust! the rain
That steals softly direction
And the key, ready to hand--sifting
One moment in sacrifice (the direst)
Through a thousand nights the flesh
Assaults outright for bolts that linger
Hidden,--O undirected as the sky
That through its black foam has no eyes
For this fixed stone of lust....
Accumulate such moments to an hour:
Account the total of this trembling tabulation.
I know the screen, the distant flying taps
And stabbing medley that sways--
And the mercy, feminine, that stays
As though prepared.
And I, entering, take up the stone
As quiet as you can make a man ...
In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void,
Wounded by apprehensions out of speech,
I hold it up against a disk of light--
I, turning, turning on smoked forking spires,
The city’s stubborn lives, desires.
Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies,
Lacks all but piteous admissions to be spilt
Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns
Record of rage and partial appetites.
The pure possession, the inclusive cloud
Whose heart is fire shall come,--the white wind rase
All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays.
LACHRYMAE CHRISTI
Whitely, while benzine
Rinsings from the moon
Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
(Inside the sure machinery
Is still
And curdled only where a sill
Sluices its one unyielding smile)
Immaculate venom binds
The fox’s teeth, and swart
Thorns freshen on the year’s
First blood. From flanks unfended,
Twanged red perfidies of spring
Are trillion on the hill.
And the nights opening
Chant pyramids,--
Anoint with innocence,--recall
To music and retrieve what perjuries
Had galvanized the eyes.
While chime
Beneath and all around
Distilling clemencies,--worms’
Inaudible whistle, tunneling
Not penitence
But song, as these
Perpetual fountains, vines,--
Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes.
(Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once and again; vermin and rod
No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)
Names peeling from Thine eyes
And their undimming lattices of flame,
Spell out in palm and pain
Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene.
Lean long from sable, slender boughs,
Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights
Strike from Thee perfect spheres,
Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail
Of earth again--
Thy face
From charred and riven stakes, O
Dionysus, Thy
Unmangled target smile.
PASSAGE
Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.
Sulking, sanctioning the sun,
My memory I left in a ravine,--
Casual louse that tissues the buckwheat,
Aprons rocks, congregates pears
In moonlit bushels
And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.
Dangerously the summer burned
(I had joined the entrainments of the wind).
The shadows of boulders lengthened my back:
In the bronze gongs of my cheeks
The rain dried without odour.
“It is not long, it is not long;
See where the red and black
Vine-stanchioned valleys--”: but the wind
Died speaking through the ages that you know
And hug, chimney-sooted heart of man!
So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke
Compiles a too well known biography.
The evening was a spear in the ravine
That throve through very oak. And had I walked
The dozen particular decimals of time?
Touching an opening laurel, I found
A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.
“Why are you back here--smiling an iron coffin?”
“To argue with the laurel,” I replied:
“Am justified in transience, fleeing
Under the constant wonder of your eyes--.”
He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies
Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss.
A serpent swam a vertex to the sun
--On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed.
What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches?
Memory, committed to the page, had broke.
THE WINE MENAGERIE
Invariably when wine redeems the sight,
Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes,
A leopard ranging always in the brow
Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.
Then glozening decanters that reflect the street
Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow
Applause flows into liquid cynosures:
--I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow.
Against the imitation onyx wainscoting
(Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure)
Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her.
Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets,
Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world....
What is it in this heap the serpent pries--
Whose skin, facsimile of time, unskeins
Octagon, sapphire transepts round the eyes;
--From whom some whispered carillon assures
Speed to the arrow into feathered skies?
Sharp to the windowpane guile drags a face,
And as the alcove of her jealousy recedes
An urchin who has left the snow
Nudges a cannister across the bar
While August meadows somewhere clasp his brow.
Each chamber, transept, coins some squint,
Remorseless line, minting their separate wills--
Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out,
Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals:
Between black tusks the roses shine!
New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons
Build freedom up about me and distill
This competence--to travel in a tear
Sparkling alone, within another’s will.
Until my blood dreams a receptive smile
Wherein new purities are snared; where chimes
Before some flame of gaunt repose a shell
Tolled once, perhaps, by every tongue in hell.
--Anguished, the wit that cries out of me:
“Alas,--these frozen billows of your skill!
Invent new dominoes of love and bile ...
Ruddy, the tooth implicit of the world
Has followed you. Though in the end you know
And count some dim inheritance of sand,
How much yet meets the treason of the snow.
“Rise from the dates and crumbs. And walk away,
Stepping over Holofernes’ shins--
Beyond the wall, whose severed head floats by
With Baptist John’s. Their whispering begins.
“--And fold your exile on your back again;
Petrushka’s valentine pivots on its pin.”
RECITATIVE
Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced,
As double as the hands that twist this glass.
Such eyes at search or rest you cannot see;
Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear!
Twin shadowed halves: the breaking second holds
In each the skin alone, and so it is
I crust a plate of vibrant mercury
Borne cleft to you, and brother in the half.
Inquire this much-exacting fragment smile,
Its drums and darkest blowing leaves ignore,--
Defer though, revocation of the tears
That yield attendance to one crucial sign.
Look steadily--how the wind feasts and spins
The brain’s disk shivered against lust. Then watch
While darkness, like an ape’s face, falls away,
And gradually white buildings answer day.
Let the same nameless gulf beleaguer us--
Alike suspend us from atrocious sums
Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant
The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream.
The highest tower,--let her ribs palisade
Wrenched gold of Nineveh;--yet leave the tower.
The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves;
A wind abides the ensign of your will....
In alternating bells have you not heard
All hours clapped dense into a single stride?
Forgive me for an echo of these things,
And let us walk through time with equal pride.
FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN
“_And so we may arrive by Talmud skill
And profane Greek to raise the building up
Of Helen’s house against the Ismaelite,
King of Thogarma, and his habergeons
Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force
Of King Abaddon, and the beast of Cittim;
Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos,
And Aben Ezra do interpret Rome._”
--THE ALCHEMIST.
I
The mind has shown itself at times
Too much the baked and labeled dough
Divided by accepted multitudes.
Across the stacked partitions of the day--
Across the memoranda, baseball scores,
The stenographic smiles and stock quotations
Smutty wings flash out equivocations.
The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;
Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd
The margins of the day, accent the curbs,
Convoying divers dawns on every corner
To druggist, barber and tobacconist,
Until the graduate opacities of evening
Take them away as suddenly to somewhere
Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.
_There is the world dimensional for those untwisted by the love of
things irreconcilable._ ...
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
Without recall,--lost yet poised in traffic.
Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,
Still flickering with those prefigurations--
Prodigal, yet uncontested now,
Half-riant before the jerky window frame.
There is some way, I think, to touch
Those hands of yours that count the nights
Stippled with pink and green advertisements.
And now, before its arteries turn dark
I would have you meet this bartered blood.
Imminent in his dream, none better knows
The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words
Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.
Reflective conversion of all things
At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread
The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread
Impinging on the throat and sides....
Inevitable, the body of the world
Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus
That winks above it, bluet in your breasts.
The earth may glide diaphanous to death;
But if I lift my arms it is to bend
To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing
The press of troubled hands, too alternate
With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame
You found in final chains, no captive then--
Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
White, through white cities passed on to assume
That world which comes to each of us alone.
Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,
Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
That beat, continuous, to hourless days--
One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.
II
Brazen hypnotics glitter here;
Glee shifts from foot to foot,
Magnetic to their tremulo.
This crashing opera bouffe,
Blest excursion! this ricochet
From roof to roof--
Know, Olympians, we are breathless
While nigger cupids scour the stars!
A thousand light shrugs balance us
Through snarling hails of melody.
White shadows slip across the floor
Splayed like cards from a loose hand;
Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters
Until somewhere a rooster banters.
Greet naïvely--yet intrepidly
New soothings, new amazements
That cornets introduce at every turn--
And you may fall downstairs with me
With perfect grace and equanimity.
Or, plaintively scud past shores
Where, by strange harmonic laws
All relatives, serene and cool,
Sit rocked in patent armchairs.
O, I have known metallic paradises
Where cuckoos clucked to finches
Above the deft catastrophes of drums.
While titters hailed the groans of death
Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen
The incunabula of the divine grotesque.
This music has a reassuring way.
The siren of the springs of guilty song--
Let us take her on the incandescent wax
Striated with nuances, nervosities
That we are heir to: she is still so young,
We cannot frown upon her as she smiles,
Dipping here in this cultivated storm
Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.
III
Capped arbiter of beauty in this street
That narrows darkly into motor dawn,--
You, here beside me, delicate ambassador
Of intricate slain numbers that arise
In whispers, naked of steel;
religious gunman!
Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon,
And in other ways than as the wind settles
On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city:
Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.
We even,
Who drove speediest destruction
In corymbulous formations of mechanics,--
Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice
Plangent over meadows, and looked down
On rifts of torn and empty houses
Like old women with teeth unjubilant
That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:
We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers
The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus,
The mounted, yielding cities of the air!
That saddled sky that shook down vertical
Repeated play of fire--no hypogeum
Of wave or rock was good against one hour.
We did not ask for that, but have survived
And will persist to speak again before
All stubble streets that have not curved
To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm
That lowers down the arc of Helen’s brow
To saturate with blessing and dismay.
A goose, tobacco and cologne--
Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven,
The lavish heart shall always have to leaven
And spread with bells and voices, and atone
The abating shadows of our conscript dust.
Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea,--
The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,
Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;
Delve upward for the new and scattered wine,
O brother-thief of time, that we recall.
Laugh out the meager penance of their days
Who dare not share with us the breath released,
The substance drilled and spent beyond repair
For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.
Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile
Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height
The imagination spans beyond despair,
Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.
AT MELVILLE’S TOMB
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides.... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
VOYAGES
I
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:
O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
II
--And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.
And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,--
Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
III
Infinite consanguinity it bears--
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.
And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,--
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,--
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands....
IV
Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
Chilled albatross’s white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality alone
Through clay aflow immortally to you.
All fragrance irrefragibly, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June--
Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
Bright staves of flowers and quills to-day as I
Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?
In signature of the incarnate word
The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught
For islands where must lead inviolably
Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,--
In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.
V
Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade--
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.
--As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
One frozen trackless smile.... What words
Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we
Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed.... “There’s
Nothing like this in the world,” you say,
Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
Too, into that godless cleft of sky
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.
“--And never to quite understand!” No,
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.
But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
VI
Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,
Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the sun’s
Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone;
O rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phœnix’ breast--
My eyes pressed black against the prow,
--Thy derelict and blinded guest
Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
More savage than the death of kings,
Some splintered garland for the seer.
Beyond siroccos harvesting
The solstice thunders, crept away,
Like a cliff swinging or a sail
Flung into April’s inmost day--
Creation’s blithe and petalled word
To the lounged goddess when she rose
Conceding dialogue with eyes
That smile unsearchable repose--
Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
--Unfolded floating dais before
Which rainbows twine continual hair--
Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!
The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.
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