Or thinks he does, a carpenter’s iridescences,

Wooden, the model for astral apprentices,

A city slapped up like a chest of tools,

The eccentric exterior of which the clocks talk.

XIX

The moon rose in the mind and each thing there

Picked up its radial aspect in the night,

Prostrate below the singleness of its will.

That which was public green turned private gray.

At another time, the radial aspect came

From a different source. But there was always one:

A century in which everything was part

Of that century and of its aspect, a personage,

A man who was the axis of his time,

An image that begot its infantines,

Imaginary poles whose intelligence

Streamed over chaos their civilities.

What is the radial aspect of this place,

This present colony of a colony

Of colonies, a sense in the changing sense

Of things? A figure like Ecclesiast,

Rugged and luminous, chants in the dark

A text that is an answer, although obscure.

XX

The imaginative transcripts were like clouds,

Today; and the transcripts of feeling, impossible

To distinguish. The town was a residuum,

A neuter shedding shapes in an absolute.

Yet the transcripts of it when it was blue remain;

And the shapes that it took in feeling, the persons that

It became, the nameless, flitting characters—

These actors still walk in a twilight muttering lines.

It may be that they mingle, clouds and men, in the air

Or street or about the corners of a man,

Who sits thinking in the corners of a room.

In this chamber the pure sphere escapes the impure,

Because the thinker himself escapes. And yet

To have evaded clouds and men leaves him

A naked being with a naked will

And everything to make. He may evade

Even his own will and in his nakedness

Inhabit the hypnosis of that sphere.

XXI

But he may not. He may not evade his will,

Nor the wills of other men; and he cannot evade

The will of necessity, the will of wills—

Romanza out of the black shepherd’s isle,

Like the constant sound of the water of the sea

In the hearing of the shepherd and his black forms;

Out of the isle, but not of any isle.

Close to the senses there lies another isle

And there the senses give and nothing take,

The opposite of Cythère, an isolation

At the centre, the object of the will, this place,

The things around—the alternate romanza

Out of the surfaces, the windows, the walls,

The bricks grown brittle in time’s poverty,

The clear. A celestial mode is paramount,

If only in the branches sweeping in the rain:

The two romanzas, the distant and the near,

Are a single voice in the boo-ha of the wind.

XXII

Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search

For reality is as momentous as

The search for god.” It is the philosopher’s search

For an interior made exterior

And the poet’s search for the same exterior made

Interior: breathless things broodingly abreath