Of majesty, of an invincible clou,

A minimum of making in the mind,

A verity of the most veracious men,

The propounding of four seasons and twelve months,

The brilliancy at the central of the earth.

XII

The poem is the cry of its occasion,

Part of the res itself and not about it.

The poet speaks the poem as it is,

Not as it was: part of the reverberation

Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues

Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks

By sight and insight as they are. There is no

Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,

The statues will have gone back to be things about.

The mobile and the immobile flickering

In the area between is and was are leaves,

Leaves burnished in autumnal burnished trees

And leaves in whirlings in the gutters, whirlings

Around and away, resembling the presence of thought,

Resembling the presences of thoughts, as if,

In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,

The town, the weather, in a casual litter,

Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.

XIII

The ephebe is solitary in his walk.

He skips the journalism of subjects, seeks out

The perquisites of sanctity, enjoys

A strong mind in a weak neighborhood and is

A serious man without the serious,

Inactive in his singular respect.

He is neither priest nor proctor at low eve,

Under the birds, among the perilous owls,

In the big X of the returning primitive.

It is a fresh spiritual that he defines,

A coldness in a long, too-constant warmth,

A thing on the side of a house, not deep in a cloud,

A difficulty that we predicate:

The difficulty of the visible

To the nations of the clear invisible,

The actual landscape with its actual horns

Of baker and butcher blowing, as if to hear,

Hear hard, gets at an essential integrity.

XIV

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.

Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him

In New Haven with an eye that does not look

Beyond the object. He sits in his room, beside

The window, close to the ramshackle spout in which

The rain falls with a ramshackle sound. He seeks

God in the object itself, without much choice.

It is a choice of the commodious adjective

For what he sees, it comes in the end to that:

The description that makes it divinity, still speech

As it touches the point of reverberation—not grim

Reality but reality grimly seen

And spoken in paradisal parlance new

And in any case never grim, the human grim

That is part of the indifference of the eye

Indifferent to what it sees. The tink-tonk

Of the rain in the spout is not a substitute.

It is of the essence not yet well perceived.

XV

He preserves himself against the repugnant rain

By an instinct for a rainless land, the self

Of his self, come at upon wide delvings of wings.