The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,

Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun

And men of day and never of pointed night,

Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air

In an accord of repetitions. Yet,

If we repeat, it is because the wind

Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible

The motions of the mind and giving form

To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day

Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,

Desire for rest, in that descending sea

Of dark, which in its very darkening

Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

… Evening, when the measure skips a beat

And then another, one by one, and all

To a seething minor swiftly modulate.

Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,

Except for our own houses, huddled low

Beneath the arches and their spangled air,

Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,

Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,

Where the voice that is great within us rises up,

As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.

The Reader

All night I sat reading a book,

Sat reading as if in a book

Of sombre pages.

It was autumn and falling stars

Covered the shrivelled forms

Crouched in the moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,

A voice was mumbling, “Everything

Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,

The melons, the vermilion pears

Of the leafless garden.”

The sombre pages bore no print

Except the trace of burning stars

In the frosty heaven.

Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery

FOR ARTHUR POWELL

I

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing

Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.

He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,

The worlds that were and will be, death and day.

Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.

His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

II

Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak.

I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill.

Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.

III

It was when the trees were leafless first in November

And their blackness became apparent, that one first

Knew the eccentric to be the base of design.

IV

Under the mat of frost and over the mat of clouds.

But in between lies the sphere of my fortune

And the fortunes of frost and of clouds,

All alike, except for the rules of the rabbis,

Happy men, distinguishing frost and clouds.

V

If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,

The future might stop emerging out of the past,

Out of what is full of us; yet the search

And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

VI

We should die except for Death

In his chalk and violet robes.