Yes: gildering the swarm-like manias

In perpetual revolution, round and round …

Lenin on a bench beside a lake disturbed

The swans. He was not the man for swans.

The slouch of his body and his look were not

In suavest keeping. The shoes, the clothes, the hat

Suited the decadence of those silences,

In which he sat. All chariots were drowned. The swans

Moved on the buried water where they lay.

Lenin took bread from his pocket, scattered it—

The swans fled outward to remoter reaches,

As if they knew of distant beaches; and were

Dissolved. The distances of space and time

Were one and swans far off were swans to come.

The eye of Lenin kept the far-off shapes.

His mind raised up, down-drowned, the chariots.

And reaches, beaches, tomorrow’s regions became

One thinking of apocalyptic legions.

V

If seeming is description without place,

The spirit’s universe, then a summer’s day,

Even the seeming of a summer’s day,

Is description without place. It is a sense

To which we refer experience, a knowledge

Incognito, the column in the desert,

On which the dove alights. Description is

Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.

It is an expectation, a desire,

A palm that rises up beyond the sea,

A little different from reality:

The difference that we make in what we see

And our memorials of that difference,

Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky.

The future is description without place,

The categorical predicate, the arc.

It is a wizened starlight growing young,

In which old stars are planets of morning, fresh

In the brilliantest descriptions of new day,

Before it comes, the just anticipation

Of the appropriate creatures, jubilant,

The forms that are attentive in thin air.

VI

Description is revelation. It is not

The thing described, nor false facsimile.

It is an artificial thing that exists,

In its own seeming, plainly visible,

Yet not too closely the double of our lives,

Intenser than any actual life could be,

A text we should be born that we might read,

More explicit than the experience of sun

And moon, the book of reconciliation,

Book of a concept only possible

In description, canon central in itself,

The thesis of the plentifullest John.

VII

Thus the theory of description matters most.

It is the theory of the word for those

For whom the word is the making of the world,

The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

It is a world of words to the end of it,

In which nothing solid is its solid self.

As, men make themselves their speech: the hard hidalgo

Lives in the mountainous character of his speech;

And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires

The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat—

A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life,

The invention of a nation in a phrase,

In a description hollowed out of hollow-bright,

The artificer of subjects still half night.

It matters, because everything we say

Of the past is description without place, a cast