And the bells belong to the sextons, after all,

As they jangle and dangle and kick their feet.

Questions Are Remarks

In the weed of summer comes this green sprout why.

The sun aches and ails and then returns halloo

Upon the horizon amid adult enfantillages.

Its fire fails to pierce the vision that beholds it,

Fails to destroy the antique acceptances,

Except that the grandson sees it as it is,

Peter the voyant, who says “Mother, what is that”—

The object that rises with so much rhetoric,

But not for him. His question is complete.

It is the question of what he is capable.

It is the extreme, the expert aetat. 2.

He will never ride the red horse she describes.

His question is complete because it contains

His utmost statement. It is his own array,

His own pageant and procession and display,

As far as nothingness permits … Hear him.

He does not say, “Mother, my mother, who are you,”

The way the drowsy, infant, old men do.

Angel Surrounded by Paysans

One of the countrymen:

There is

A welcome at the door to which no one comes?

The angel:

I am the angel of reality,

Seen for a moment standing in the door.

I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore

And live without a tepid aureole,

Or stars that follow me, not to attend,

But, of my being and its knowing, part.

I am one of you and being one of you

Is being and knowing what I am and know.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,

Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,

And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,

Like watery words awash; like meanings said

By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,

Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man

Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn

Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

Things of August

I

These locusts by day, these crickets by night

Are the instruments on which to play

Of an old and disused ambit of the soul

Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery—

A disused ambit of the spirit’s way,

The sort of thing that August crooners sing,

By a pure fountain, that was a ghost, and is,

Under the sun-slides of a sloping mountain;

Or else a new aspect, say the spirit’s sex,

Its attitudes, its answers to attitudes

And the sex of its voices, as the voice of one

Meets nakedly another’s naked voice.

Nothing is lost, loud locusts. No note fails.

These sounds are long in the living of the ear.

The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses

Is a memorizing, a trying out, to keep.

II

We make, although inside an egg,

Variations on the words spread sail.

The morning-glories grow in the egg.