Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.

Read to the congregation, for today

And for tomorrow, this extremity,

This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,

Contriving balance to contrive a whole,

The vital, the never-failing genius,

Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.

In these unhappy he meditates a whole,

The full of fortune and the full of fate,

As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,

To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights

Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick.

A Primitive Like an Orb

I

The essential poem at the centre of things,

The arias that spiritual fiddlings make,

Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good

And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs,

A difficult apperception, this gorging good,

Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold,

This fortune’s finding, disposed and re-disposed

By such slight genii in such pale air.

II

We do not prove the existence of the poem.

It is something seen and known in lesser poems.

It is the huge, high harmony that sounds

A little and a little, suddenly,

By means of a separate sense. It is and it

Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,

The breadth of an accelerando moves,

Captives the being, widens—and was there.

III

What milk there is in such captivity,

What wheaten bread and oaten cake and kind,

Green guests and table in the woods and songs

At heart, within an instant’s motion, within

A space grown wide, the inevitable blue

Of secluded thunder, an illusion, as it was,

Oh as, always too heavy for the sense

To seize, the obscurest as, the distant was …

IV

One poem proves another and the whole,

For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:

The lover, the believer and the poet.

Their words are chosen out of their desire,

The joy of language, when it is themselves.

With these they celebrate the central poem,

The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent,

Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

V

Until the used-to earth and sky, and the tree

And cloud, the used-to tree and used-to cloud,

Lose the old uses that they made of them,

And they: these men, and earth and sky, inform

Each other by sharp informations, sharp,

Free knowledges, secreted until then,

Breaches of that which held them fast. It is

As if the central poem became the world,

VI

And the world the central poem, each one the mate

Of the other, as if summer was a spouse,

Espoused each morning, each long afternoon,

And the mate of summer: her mirror and her look,

Her only place and person, a self of her

That speaks, denouncing separate selves, both one.

The essential poem begets the others. The light

Of it is not a light apart, up-hill.

VII

The central poem is the poem of the whole,

The poem of the composition of the whole,

The composition of blue sea and of green,