At last, in that blond atmosphere, bronzed hard,

They said, “We are back once more in the land of the elm trees,

But folded over, turned round.” It was the same,

Except for the adjectives, an alteration

Of words that was a change of nature, more

Than the difference that clouds make over a town.

The countrymen were changed and each constant thing.

Their dark-colored words had redescribed the citrons.

XXX

The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.

The robins are là-bas, the squirrels, in tree-caves,

Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels.

The wind has blown the silence of summer away.

It buzzes beyond the horizon or in the ground:

In mud under ponds, where the sky used to be reflected.

The barrenness that appears is an exposing.

It is not part of what is absent, a halt

For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.

It is a coming on and a coming forth.

The pines that were fans and fragrances emerge,

Staked solidly in a gusty grappling with rocks.

The glass of the air becomes an element—

It was something imagined that has been washed away.

A clearness has returned. It stands restored.

It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.

It is a visibility of thought,

In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.

XXXI

The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds

Not often realized, the lighter words

In the heavy drum of speech, the inner men

Behind the outer shields, the sheets of music

In the strokes of thunder, dead candles at the window

When day comes, fire-foams in the motions of the sea,

Flickings from finikin to fine finikin

And the general fidget from busts of Constantine

To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank,

These are the edgings and inchings of final form,

The swarming activities of the formulae

Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at,

Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet,

A philosopher practicing scales on his piano,

A woman writing a note and tearing it up.

It is not in the premise that reality

Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses

A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

The Old Lutheran Bells at Home

These are the voices of the pastors calling

In the names of St. Paul and of the halo-John

And of other holy and learned men, among them

Great choristers, propounders of hymns, trumpeters,

Jerome and the scrupulous Francis and Sunday women,

The nurses of the spirit’s innocence.

These are the voices of the pastors calling

Much rough-end being to smooth Paradise,

Spreading out fortress walls like fortress wings.

Deep in their sound the stentor Martin sings.

Dark Juan looks outward through his mystic brow …

Each sexton has his sect. The bells have none.

These are the voices of the pastors calling

And calling like the long echoes in long sleep,

Generations of shepherds to generations of sheep.

Each truth is a sect though no bells ring for it.