Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,

The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,

The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak

Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw

Of hum, inquisitorial botanist,

And general lexicographer of mute

And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,

A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.

What word split up in clickering syllables

And storming under multitudinous tones

Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?

Crispin was washed away by magnitude.

The whole of life that still remained in him

Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,

Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,

Polyphony beyond his baton’s thrust.

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,

The old age of a watery realist,

Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes

Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age

That whispered to the sun’s compassion, made

A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,

And on the clopping foot-ways of the moon

Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that

Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,

Except in faint, memorial gesturings,

That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,

Here, something in the rise and fall of wind

That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,

A sunken voice, both of remembering

And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.

Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.

The valet in the tempest was annulled.

Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,

And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.

Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales,

Dejected his manner to the turbulence.

The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,

The dead brine melted in him like a dew

Of winter, until nothing of himself

Remained, except some starker, barer self

In a starker, barer world, in which the sun

Was not the sun because it never shone

With bland complaisance on pale parasols,

Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.

Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried

Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin

Became an introspective voyager.

Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,

Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,

But with a speech belched out of hoary darks

Noway resembling his, a visible thing,

And excepting negligible Triton, free

From the unavoidable shadow of himself

That lay elsewhere around him. Severance

Was clear. The last distortion of romance

Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea

Severs not only lands but also selves.

Here was no help before reality.

Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.

The imagination, here, could not evade,

In poems of plums, the strict austerity

Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.

The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.

What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?

Out of what swift destruction did it spring?

It was caparison of wind and cloud

And something given to make whole among

The ruses that were shattered by the large.

II

Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers

Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,

In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan

And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,

As if raspberry tanagers in palms,