Of what are these the creatures, what element

Or—yes: what elements, unreconciled

Because there is no golden solvent here?

If they were creatures of the sea alone,

But singular, they would, like water, scale

The uptopping top and tip of things, borne up

By the cadaver of these caverns, half-asleep.

But if they are of sea, earth, sky—water

And fire and air and things not discomposed

From ignorance, not an undivided whole,

It is an ocean of watery images

And shapes of fire, and wind that bears them down.

Perhaps these forms are seeking to escape

Cadaverous undulations. Rest, old mould …

Someone Puts a Pineapple Together

I

O juventes, O filii, he contemplates

A wholly artificial nature, in which

The profusion of metaphor has been increased.

It is something on a table that he sees,

The root of a form, as of this fruit, a fund,

The angel at the centre of this rind,

This husk of Cuba, tufted emerald,

Himself, may be, the irreducible X

At the bottom of imagined artifice,

Its inhabitant and elect expositor.

It is as if there were three planets: the sun,

The moon and the imagination, or, say,

Day, night and man and his endless effigies.

If he sees an object on a table, much like

A jar of the shoots of an infant country, green

And bright, or like a venerable urn,

Which, from the ash within it, fortifies

A green that is the ash of what green is,

He sees it in this tangent of himself.

And in this tangent it becomes a thing

Of weight, on which the weightless rests: from which

The ephemeras of the tangent swarm, the chance

Concourse of planetary originals,

Yet, as it seems, of human residence.

II

He must say nothing of the fruit that is

Not true, nor think it, less. He must defy

The metaphor that murders metaphor.

He seeks as image a second of the self,

Made subtle by truth’s most jealous subtlety,

Like the true light of the truest sun, the true

Power in the waving of the wand of the moon,

Whose shining is the intelligence of our sleep.

He seeks an image certain as meaning is

To sound, sound’s substance and executant,

The particular tingle in a proclamation

That makes it say the little thing it says,

Below the prerogative jumble. The fruit so seen

As a part of the nature that he contemplates

Is fertile with more than changes of the light

On the table or in the colors of the room.

Its propagations are more erudite,

Like precious scholia jotted down in the dark.

Did not the age that bore him bear him among

Its infiltrations? There had been an age

When a pineapple on the table was enough,

Without the forfeit scholar coming in,

Without his enlargings and pale arrondissements,

Without the furious roar in his capital.

Green had, those days, its own implacable sting.

But now a habit of the truth had formed

To protect him in a privacy, in which