If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.

But the quotidian composed as his,

Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,

The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,

Although the rose was not the noble thorn

Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,

Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung

Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights

In which those frail custodians watched,

Indifferent to the tepid summer cold,

While he poured out upon the lips of her

That lay beside him, the quotidian

Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.

For all it takes it gives a humped return

Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.

VI

And Daughters with Curls

Portentous enunciation, syllable

To blessed syllable affined, and sound

Bubbling felicity in cantilene,

Prolific and tormenting tenderness

Of music, as it comes to unison,

Forgather and bell boldly Crispin’s last

Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur

His grand pronunciamento and devise.

The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,

Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,

Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,

Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.

The return to social nature, once begun,

Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,

Involved him in midwifery so dense

His cabin counted as phylactery,

Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt

Of children nibbling at the sugared void,

Infants yet eminently old, then dome

And halidom for the unbraided femes,

Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,

Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,

True daughters both of Crispin and his clay.

All this with many mulctings of the man,

Effective colonizer sharply stopped

In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.

But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs

Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints

Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex

The stopper to indulgent fatalist

Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon

His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,

She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,

So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,

Attentive to a coronal of things

Secret and singular. Second, upon

A second similar counterpart, a maid

Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake

Excepting to the motherly footstep, but

Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.

Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,

A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,

Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,

All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.

A few years more and the vermeil capuchin

Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,

The dulcet omen fit for such a house.

The second sister dallying was shy

To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself

Out of her botches, hot embosomer.

The third one gaping at the orioles

Lettered herself demurely as became

A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.

The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.

Four daughters in a world too intricate

In the beginning, four blithe instruments

Of differing struts, four voices several

In couch, four more personæ, intimate

As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue

That should be silver, four accustomed seeds

Hinting incredible hues, four selfsame lights