How easily the blown banners change to wings …

Things dark on the horizons of perception

Become accompaniments of fortune, but

Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,

Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach,

The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme

Of the unknown. The newsboys’ muttering

Becomes another murmuring; the smell

Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled …

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,

The candle as it evades the sight, these are

The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,

A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,

And these beneath the shadow of a shape

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent

On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,

A light on the candle tearing against the wick

To join a hovering excellence, to escape

From fire and be part only of that of which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.

Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.

Be orator but with an accurate tongue

And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,

Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,

So that we feel, in this illumined large,

The veritable small, so that each of us

Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice

In yours, master and commiserable man,

Intent on your particles of nether-do,

Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,

In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive

Yet living in two worlds, impenitent

As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,

Impatient for the grandeur that you need

In so much misery; and yet finding it

Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,

Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,

As in the last drop of the deepest blood,

As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,

Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,

For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.

It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most.

It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.

This is the tragic accent of the scene.

And you—it is you that speak it, without speech,

The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,

The one invulnerable man among

Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,

Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained vaults.

The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.

The life of the city never lets go, nor do you

Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.

Its domes are the architecture of your bed.

The bells keep on repeating solemn names

In choruses and choirs of choruses,

Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery

Of silence, that any solitude of sense

Should give you more than their peculiar chords

And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,

With every visible thing enlarged and yet