Followed the drift of the obese machine

Of ocean, perfected in indolence.

What pistache one, ingenious and droll,

Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery

And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat

At tossing saucers—cloudy-conjuring sea?

C’était mon esprit bâtard, l’ignominie.

The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch

Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind

Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue

To clearing opalescence. Then the sea

And heaven rolled as one and from the two

Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

The Sun This March

The exceeding brightness of this early sun

Makes me conceive how dark I have become,

And re-illumines things that used to turn

To gold in broadest blue, and be a part

Of a turning spirit in an earlier self.

That, too, returns from out the winter’s air,

Like an hallucination come to daze

The corner of the eye. Our element,

Cold is our element and winter’s air

Brings voices as of lions coming down.

Oh! Rabbi, rabbi, fend my soul for me

And true savant of this dark nature be.

Lunar Paraphrase

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

When, at the wearier end of November,

Her old light moves along the branches,

Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;

When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,

Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,

Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter

Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;

When over the houses, a golden illusion

Brings back an earlier season of quiet

And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness—

The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

Anatomy of Monotony

I

If from the earth we came, it was an earth

That bore us as a part of all the things

It breeds and that was lewder than it is.

Our nature is her nature. Hence it comes,

Since by our nature we grow old, earth grows

The same. We parallel the mother’s death.

She walks an autumn ampler than the wind

Cries up for us and colder than the frost

Pricks in our spirits at the summer’s end,

And over the bare spaces of our skies

She sees a barer sky that does not bend.

II

The body walks forth naked in the sun

And, out of tenderness or grief, the sun

Gives comfort, so that other bodies come,

Twinning our phantasy and our device,

And apt in versatile motion, touch and sound

To make the body covetous in desire

Of the still finer, more implacable chords.

So be it. Yet the spaciousness and light

In which the body walks and is deceived,

Falls from that fatal and that barer sky,

And this the spirit sees and is aggrieved.

Autumn Refrain

The skreak and skritter of evening gone

And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,

The sorrows of sun, too, gone … the moon and moon,

The yellow moon of words about the nightingale

In measureless measures, not a bird for me

But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air