The voice of angry fear,

The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound

As of the great wind howling,

By which sorrow is released,

Dismissed, absolved

In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.

He was young, and we, we are old.

The snow is falling

And the streets are full of cries.

Be seated, thou.

Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz

The truth is that there comes a time

When we can mourn no more over music

That is so much motionless sound.

There comes a time when the waltz

Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode

Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.

Too many waltzes have ended. And then

There’s that mountain-minded Hoon,

For whom desire was never that of the waltz,

Who found all form and order in solitude,

For whom the shapes were never the figures of men.

Now, for him, his forms have vanished.

There is order in neither sea nor sun.

The shapes have lost their glistening.

There are these sudden mobs of men,

These sudden clouds of faces and arms,

An immense suppression, freed,

These voices crying without knowing for what,

Except to be happy, without knowing how,

Imposing forms they cannot describe,

Requiring order beyond their speech.

Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapes

For which the voices cry, these, too, may be

Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire.

Too many waltzes—The epic of disbelief

Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.

Some harmonious skeptic soon in a skeptical music

Will unite these figures of men and their shapes

Will glisten again with motion, the music

Will be motion and full of shadows.

Dance of the Macabre Mice

In the land of turkeys in turkey weather

At the base of the statue, we go round and round.

What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!

Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice.

This dance has no name. It is a hungry dance.

We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur’s sword,

Reading the lordly language of the inscription,

Which is like zithers and tambourines combined:

The Founder of the State. Whoever founded

A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?

What a beautiful tableau tinted and towering,

The arm of bronze outstretched against all evil!

Anglais Mort à Florence

A little less returned for him each spring.

Music began to fail him. Brahms, although

His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,

Certain of its uncertainty, in which

That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.

Only last year he said that the naked moon

Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood

When he was young), naked and alien,

More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.

He used his reason, exercised his will,

Turning in time to Brahms as alternate