A hatching that stared and demanded an answering look.

XXVI

How facilely the purple blotches fell

On the walk, purple and blue, and red and gold,

Blooming and beaming and voluming colors out.

Away from them, capes, along the afternoon Sound,

Shook off their dark marine in lapis light.

The sea shivered in transcendent change, rose up

As rain and booming, gleaming, blowing, swept

The wateriness of green wet in the sky.

Mountains appeared with greater eloquence

Than that of their clouds. These lineaments were the earth,

Seen as inamorata, of loving fame

Added and added out of a fame-full heart …

But, here, the inamorata, without distance

And thereby lost, and naked or in rags,

Shrunk in the poverty of being close,

Touches, as one hand touches another hand,

Or as a voice that, speaking without form,

Gritting the ear, whispers humane repose.

XXVII

A scholar, in his Segmenta, left a note,

As follows, “The Ruler of Reality,

If more unreal than New Haven, is not

A real ruler, but rules what is unreal.”

In addition, there were draftings of him, thus:

“He is the consort of the Queen of Fact.

Sunrise is his garment’s hem, sunset is hers.

He is the theorist of life, not death,

The total excellence of its total book.”

Again, “The sibilance of phrases is his

Or partly his. His voice is audible,

As the fore-meaning in music is.” Again,

“This man abolishes by being himself

That which is not ourselves: the regalia,

The attributions, the plume and helmet-ho.”

Again, “He has thought it out, he thinks it out,

As he has been and is and, with the Queen

Of Fact, lies at his ease beside the sea.”

XXVIII

If it should be true that reality exists

In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it,

The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her

Misericordia, it follows that

Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven

Before and after one arrives or, say,

Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark,

Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes

Or Paris in conversation at a café.

This endlessly elaborating poem

Displays the theory of poetry,

As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize

Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory

Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,

In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,

The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

XXIX

In the land of the lemon trees, yellow and yellow were

Yellow-blue, yellow-green, pungent with citron-sap,

Dangling and spangling, the mic-mac of mocking birds.

In the land of the elm trees, wandering mariners

Looked on big women, whose ruddy-ripe images

Wreathed round and round the round wreath of autumn.

They rolled their r’s, there, in the land of the citrons.

In the land of big mariners, the words they spoke

Were mere brown clods, mere catching weeds of talk.

When the mariners came to the land of the lemon trees,