In humanity has not conceived of a race

Completely physical in a physical world.

The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals

Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,

The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.

This is the thesis scrivened in delight,

The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.

One might have thought of sight, but who could think

Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?

Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,

But the dark italics it could not propound.

And out of what one sees and hears and out

Of what one feels, who could have thought to make

So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,

As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming

With the metaphysical changes that occur,

Merely in living as and where we live.

The Bed of Old John Zeller

This structure of ideas, these ghostly sequences

Of the mind, result only in disaster. It follows,

Casual poet, that to add your own disorder to disaster

Makes more of it. It is easy to wish for another structure

Of ideas and to say as usual that there must be

Other ghostly sequences and, it would be, luminous

Sequences, thought of among spheres in the old peak of night:

This is the habit of wishing, as if one’s grandfather lay

In one’s heart and wished as he had always wished, unable

To sleep in that bed for its disorder, talking of ghostly

Sequences that would be sleep and ting-tang tossing, so that

He might slowly forget. It is more difficult to evade

That habit of wishing and to accept the structure

Of things as the structure of ideas. It was the structure

Of things at least that was thought of in the old peak of night.

Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit

If there must be a god in the house, must be,

Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,

Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out

His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,

As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;

As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,

The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech

From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one

That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass

Of which we are too distantly a part.

The Pure Good of Theory

I

All the Preludes to Felicity

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time

That batters against the mind, silent and proud,

The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse