His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon.

It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told.

It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.

It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

The black fugatos are strumming the blacknesses of black …

The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.

He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.

His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,

In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.

A Quiet Normal Life

His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not

In anything that he constructed, so frail,

So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,

He became an inhabitant, obedient

To gallant notions on the part of cold.

It was here. This was the setting and the time

Of year. Here in his house and in his room,

In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

And the oldest and the warmest heart was cut

By gallant notions on the part of night—

Both late and alone, above the crickets’ chords,

Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.

There was no fury in transcendent forms.

But his actual candle blazed with artifice.

Long and Sluggish Lines

It makes so little difference, at so much more

Than seventy, here one looks, one has been there before.

Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow

Of air and whirled away. But it has been often so.

The trees have a look as if they bore sad names

And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,

In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,

Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.

What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the side

Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;

Or these—escent—issant pre-personae: first fly,

A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,

Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,

The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?

… Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.

The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal

Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.

To an Old Philosopher in Rome

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street

Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement

Of men growing small in the distances of space,

Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,

Unintelligible absolution and an end—

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome

Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.

It is as if in a human dignity

Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which

Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.