Of the imagination, made in sound;

And because what we say of the future must portend,

Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be

Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors

The wood-doves are singing along the Perkiomen.

The bass lie deep, still afraid of the Indians.

In the one ear of the fisherman, who is all

One ear, the wood-doves are singing a single song.

The bass keep looking ahead, upstream, in one

Direction, shrinking from the spit and splash

Of waterish spears. The fisherman is all

One eye, in which the dove resembles the dove.

There is one dove, one bass, one fisherman.

Yet coo becomes rou-coo, rou-coo. How close

To the unstated theme each variation comes …

In that one ear it might strike perfectly:

State the disclosure. In that one eye the dove

Might spring to sight and yet remain a dove.

The fisherman might be the single man

In whose breast, the dove, alighting, would grow still.

Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion

Oh, that this lashing wind was something more

Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter …

The rain is pouring down. It is July.

There is lightning and the thickest thunder.

It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,

In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.

People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,

Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,

The air is full of children, statues, roofs

And snow. The theatre is spinning round,

Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.

The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.

And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,

Has lost the whole in which he was contained,

Knows desire without an object of desire,

All mind and violence and nothing felt.

He knows he has nothing more to think about,

Like the wind that lashes everything at once.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain

Unsnack your snood, madanna, for the stars

Are shining on all brows of Neversink.

Already the green bird of summer has flown

Away. The night-flies acknowledge these planets,

Predestined to this night, this noise and the place