Because what they have chosen is their choice

No more and because they lack the will to tell

A matin gold from gold of Hesperus

The dot, the pale pole of resemblances

Experienced yet not well seen; of how

Much choosing is the final choice made up,

And who shall speak it, what child or wanderer

Or woman weeping in a room or man,

The last man given for epitome,

Upon whose lips the dissertation sounds,

And in what place, what exultant terminal,

And at what time both of the year and day;

And what heroic nature of what text

Shall be the celebration in the words

Of that oration, the happiest sense in which

A world agrees, thought’s compromise, resolved

At last, the centre of resemblance, found

Under the bones of time’s philosophers?

The orator will say that we ourselves

Stand at the centre of ideal time,

The inhuman making choice of a human self.

The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract

This day writhes with what? The lecturer

On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself

And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe,

And red, and right. The particular question—here

The particular answer to the particular question

Is not in point—the question is in point.

If the day writhes, it is not with revelations.

One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one

Of the categories. So said, this placid space

Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue,

There must be no questions. It is an intellect

Of windings round and dodges to and fro,

Writhings in wrong obliques and distances,

Not an intellect in which we are fleet: present

Everywhere in space at once, cloud-pole

Of communication. It would be enough

If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed

In This Beautiful World Of Ours and not as now,

Helplessly at the edge, enough to be

Complete, because at the middle, if only in sense,

And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy.

The Owl in the Sarcophagus

I

Two forms move among the dead, high sleep

Who by his highness quiets them, high peace

Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest,

Two brothers. And a third form, she that says

Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there,

To those that cannot say good-by themselves.

These forms are visible to the eye that needs,

Needs out of the whole necessity of sight.

The third form speaks, because the ear repeats,

Without a voice, inventions of farewell.

These forms are not abortive figures, rocks,

In penetrable symbols, motionless. They move

About the night. They live without our light,

In an element not the heaviness of time,

In which reality is prodigy.

There sleep the brother is the father, too,

And peace is cousin by a hundred names

And she that in the syllable between life

And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice,

Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as

My memory, is the mother of us all,