For souvenirs of time, lost time,

Adieux, shapes, images—

No, not of day, but of themselves,

Not of perpetual time.

And, therefore, aquiline pedants find

The philosopher’s hat to be part of the mind,

The Swedish cart to be part of the heart.

Credences of Summer

I

Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered

And spring’s infuriations over and a long way

To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods

Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight

Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.

Now the mind lays by its trouble and considers.

The fidgets of remembrance come to this.

This is the last day of a certain year

Beyond which there is nothing left of time.

It comes to this and the imagination’s life.

There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt

And this must comfort the heart’s core against

Its false disasters—these fathers standing round,

These mothers touching, speaking, being near,

These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass.

II

Postpone the anatomy of summer, as

The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.

Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.

Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky

Without evasion by a single metaphor.

Look at it in its essential barrenness

And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

Fix it in an eternal foliage

And fill the foliage with arrested peace,

Joy of such permanence, right ignorance

Of change still possible. Exile desire

For what is not. This is the barrenness

Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

III

It is the natural tower of all the world,

The point of survey, green’s green apogee,

But a tower more precious than the view beyond,

A point of survey squatting like a throne,

Axis of everything, green’s apogee

And happiest folk-land, mostly marriage-hymns.

It is the mountain on which the tower stands,

It is the final mountain. Here the sun,

Sleepless, inhales his proper air, and rests.

This is the refuge that the end creates.

It is the old man standing on the tower,

Who reads no book. His ruddy ancientness

Absorbs the ruddy summer and is appeased,

By an understanding that fulfils his age,

By a feeling capable of nothing more.

IV

One of the limits of reality

Presents itself in Oley when the hay,

Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is

A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.

There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye

And the secondary senses of the ear

Swarm, not with secondary sounds, but choirs,

Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds

With nothing else compounded, carried full,

Pure rhetoric of a language without words.

Things stop in that direction and since they stop

The direction stops and we accept what is

As good. The utmost must be good and is

And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees