He does not change the sea from crumpled tinfoil

To chromatic crawler. But it is changed.

He does not raise the rousing of fresh light

On the still, black-slatted eastward shutters.

The woman is chosen but not by him,

Among the endlessly emerging accords.

The world? The inhuman as human? That which thinks not,

Feels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling?

It habituates him to the invisible,

By its faculty of the exceptional,

The faculty of ellipses and deviations,

In which he exists but never as himself.

VII

He turned from the tower to the house,

From the spun sky and the high and deadly view,

To the novels on the table,

The geraniums on the sill.

He could understand the things at home.

And being up high had helped him when up high,

As if on a taller tower

He would be certain to see

That, in the shadowless atmosphere,

The knowledge of things lay round but unperceived:

The height was not quite proper;

The position was wrong.

It was curious to have to descend

And, seated in the nature of his chair,

To feel the satisfactions

Of that transparent air.

VIII

When was it that the particles became

The whole man, that tempers and beliefs became

Temper and belief and that differences lost

Difference and were one? It had to be

In the presence of a solitude of the self,

An expanse and the abstraction of an expanse,

A zone of time without the ticking of clocks,

A color that moved us with forgetfulness.

When was it that we heard the voice of union?

Was it as we sat in the park and the archaic form

Of a woman with a cloud on her shoulder rose

Against the trees and then against the sky

And the sense of the archaic touched us at once

In a movement of the outlines of similarity?

We resembled one another at the sight.

The forgetful color of the autumn day

Was full of these archaic forms, giants

Of sense, evoking one thing in many men,

Evoking an archaic space, vanishing

In the space, leaving an outline of the size

Of the impersonal person, the wanderer,

The father, the ancestor, the bearded peer,

The total of human shadows bright as glass.

IX

A new text of the world,

A scribble of fret and fear and fate,

From a bravura of the mind,

A courage of the eye,

In which, for all the breathings

From the edge of night,

And for all the white voices

That were rosen once,

The meanings are our own—

It is a text that we shall be needing,

To be the footing of noon,

The pillar of midnight,

That comes from ourselves, neither from knowing

Nor not knowing, yet free from question,

Because we wanted it so

And it had to be,

A text of intelligent men

At the centre of the unintelligible,

As in a hermitage, for us to think,

Writing and reading the rigid inscription.

X

The mornings grow silent, the never-tiring wonder.