Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate

Through all its purples to the final slate,

Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident—

Out of such mildew plucking neater mould

And spouting new orations of the cold.

One might. One might. But time will not relent.

The Doctor of Geneva

The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand

That lay impounding the Pacific swell,

Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.

Lacustrine man had never been assailed

By such long-rolling opulent cataracts,

Unless Racine or Bossuet held the like.

He did not quail. A man so used to plumb

The multifarious heavens felt no awe

Before these visible, voluble delugings,

Which yet found means to set his simmering mind

Spinning and hissing with oracular

Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste,

Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang

In an unburgherly apocalypse.

The doctor used his handkerchief and sighed.

Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,

Is just what you say.

Have it your way.

The world is ugly,

And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,

That animal eye,

Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,

That seed,

Have it your way.

The world is ugly,

And the people are sad.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended

The western day through what you called

The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Another Weeping Woman

Pour the unhappiness out

From your too bitter heart,

Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.

It is in the water of tears

Its black blooms rise.

The magnificent cause of being,

The imagination, the one reality

In this imagined world

Leaves you

With him for whom no phantasy moves,

And you are pierced by a death.