I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still,

Being and sitting still, something resides,

Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,

And grates these evasions of the nightingale

Though I have never—shall never hear that bird.

And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,

The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

The Brave Man

The sun, that brave man,

Comes through boughs that lie in wait,

That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes

In dark forms of the grass

Run away.

The good stars,

Pale helms and spiky spurs,

Run away.

Fears of my bed,

Fears of life and fears of death,

Run away.

That brave man comes up

From below and walks without meditation,

That brave man.

A Fading of the Sun

Who can think of the sun costuming clouds

When all people are shaken

Or of night endazzled, proud,

When people awaken

And cry and cry for help?

The warm antiquity of self,

Everyone, grows suddenly cold.

The tea is bad, bread sad.

How can the world so old be so mad

That the people die?

If joy shall be without a book

It lies, themselves within themselves,

If they will look

Within themselves

And cry and cry for help,

Within as pillars of the sun,

Supports of night. The tea,

The wine is good. The bread,

The meat is sweet.

And they will not die.

The Pleasures of Merely Circulating

The garden flew round with the angel,

The angel flew round with the clouds,

And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round

And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

Is there any secret in skulls,

The cattle skulls in the woods?

Do the drummers in black hoods

Rumble anything out of their drums?

Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby

Might well have been German or Spanish,

Yet that things go round and again go round

Has rather a classical sound.

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.