Her time becomes again, as it became,

The crown and week-day coronal of her fame.

II

Such seemings are the actual ones: the way

Things look each day, each morning, or the style

Peculiar to the queen, this queen or that,

The lesser seeming original in the blind

Forward of the eye that, in its backward, sees

The greater seeming of the major mind.

An age is a manner collected from a queen.

An age is green or red. An age believes

Or it denies. An age is solitude

Or a barricade against the singular man

By the incalculably plural. Hence

Its identity is merely a thing that seems,

In the seeming of an original in the eye,

In the major manner of a queen, the green

The red, the blue, the argent queen. If not,

What subtlety would apparition have?

In flat appearance we should be and be,

Except for delicate clinkings not explained.

These are the actual seemings that we see,

Hear, feel and know. We feel and know them so.

III

There are potential seemings, arrogant

To be, as on the youngest poet’s page,

Or in the dark musician, listening

To hear more brightly the contriving chords.

There are potential seemings turbulent

In the death of a soldier, like the utmost will,

The more than human commonplace of blood,

The breath that gushes upward and is gone,

And another breath emerging out of death,

That speaks for him such seemings as death gives.

There might be, too, a change immenser than

A poet’s metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of music where

Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content,

In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

That we do not need to understand, complete

Without secret arrangements of it in the mind.

There might be in the curling-out of spring

A purple-leaping element that forth

Would froth the whole heaven with its seeming-so,

The intentions of a mind as yet unknown,

The spirit of one dwelling in a seed,

Itself that seed’s ripe, unpredictable fruit.

Things are as they seemed to Calvin or to Anne

Of England, to Pablo Neruda in Ceylon,

To Nietzsche in Basel, to Lenin by a lake.

But the integrations of the past are like

A Museo Olimpico, so much

So little, our affair, which is the affair

Of the possible: seemings that are to be,

Seemings that it is possible may be.

IV

Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool

Of these discolorations, mastering

The moving and the moving of their forms

In the much-mottled motion of blank time.

His revery was the deepness of the pool,

The very pool, his thoughts the colored forms,

The eccentric souvenirs of human shapes,

Wrapped in their seemings, crowd on curious crowd,

In a kind of total affluence, all first,

All final, colors subjected in revery

To an innate grandiose, an innate light,

The sun of Nietzsche gildering the pool,