Of heat upon his pane. This was the span

Of force, the quintessential fact, the note

Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,

The thing that makes him envious in phrase.

And while the torrent on the roof still droned

He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free

And more than free, elate, intent, profound

And studious of a self possessing him,

That was not in him in the crusty town

From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay

The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,

In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,

Let down gigantic quavers of its voice,

For Crispin to vociferate again.

III

Approaching Carolina

The book of moonlight is not written yet

Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room

For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,

Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage

Through sweating changes, never could forget

That wakefulness or meditating sleep,

In which the sulky strophes willingly

Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.

Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book

For the legendary moonlight that once burned

In Crispin’s mind above a continent.

America was always north to him,

A northern west or western north, but north,

And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled

And lank, rising and slumping from a sea

Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread

In endless ledges, glittering, submerged

And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.

The spring came there in clinking pannicles

Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,

If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,

Before the winter’s vacancy returned.

The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,

Was like a glacial pink upon the air.

The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice

Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,

Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

How many poems he denied himself

In his observant progress, lesser things

Than the relentless contact he desired;

How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds

He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,

Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;

And what descants, he sent to banishment!

Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave

The liaison, the blissful liaison,

Between himself and his environment,

Which was, and if, chief motive, first delight,

For him, and not for him alone. It seemed

Illusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,

Wrong as a divagation to Peking,

To him that postulated as his theme

The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,

A passionately niggling nightingale.

Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,

A minor meeting, facile, delicate.

Thus he conceived his voyaging to be

An up and down between two elements,

A fluctuating between sun and moon,

A sally into gold and crimson forms,

As on this voyage, out of goblinry,

And then retirement like a turning back

And sinking down to the indulgences

That in the moonlight have their habitude.

But let these backward lapses, if they would,

Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew

It was a flourishing tropic he required

For his refreshment, an abundant zone,

Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious,

Yet with a harmony not rarefied