The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:

The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,

The gay tournamonde as of a single world

In which he is and as and is are one.

For its counterpart a kind of counterpoint

Irked the wet wallows of the water-spout.

The rain kept falling loudly in the trees

And on the ground. The hibernal dark that hung

In primavera, the shadow of bare rock,

Becomes the rock of autumn, glittering,

Ponderable source of each imponderable,

The weight we lift with the finger of a dream,

The heaviness we lighten by light will,

By the hand of desire, faint, sensitive, the soft

Touch and trouble of the touch of the actual hand.

XVI

Among time’s images, there is not one

Of this present, the venerable mask above

The dilapidation of dilapidations.

The oldest-newest day is the newest alone.

The oldest-newest night does not creak by,

With lanterns, like a celestial ancientness.

Silently it heaves its youthful sleep from the sea—

The Oklahoman—the Italian blue

Beyond the horizon with its masculine,

Their eyes closed, in a young palaver of lips.

And yet the wind whimpers oldly of old age

In the western night. The venerable mask,

In this perfection, occasionally speaks

And something of death’s poverty is heard.

This should be tragedy’s most moving face.

It is a bough in the electric light

And exhalations in the eaves, so little

To indicate the total leaflessness.

XVII

The color is almost the color of comedy,

Not quite. It comes to the point and at the point,

It fails. The strength at the centre is serious.

Perhaps instead of failing it rejects

As a serious strength rejects pin-idleness.

A blank underlies the trials of device,

The dominant blank, the unapproachable.

This is the mirror of the high serious:

Blue verdured into a damask’s lofty symbol,

Gold easings and ouncings and fluctuations of thread

And beetling of belts and lights of general stones,

Like blessed beams from out a blessed bush

Or the wasted figurations of the wastes

Of night, time and the imagination,

Saved and beholden, in a robe of rays.

These fitful sayings are, also, of tragedy:

The serious reflection is composed

Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.

XVIII

It is the window that makes it difficult

To say good-by to the past and to live and to be

In the present state of things as, say, to paint

In the present state of painting and not the state

Of thirty years ago. It is looking out

Of the window and walking in the street and seeing,

As if the eyes were the present or part of it,

As if the ears heard any shocking sound,

As if life and death were ever physical.

The life and death of this carpenter depend

On a fuchsia in a can—and iridescences

Of petals that will never be realized,

Things not yet true which he perceives through truth,

Or thinks he does, as he perceives the present,