In speech. He was that music and himself.

They were particles of order, a single majesty:

But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He yielded himself to that single majesty;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone,

When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,

Before the colors deepened and grew small.

Some Friends from Pascagoula

Tell me more of the eagle, Cotton,

And you, black Sly,

Tell me how he descended

Out of the morning sky.

Describe with deepened voice

And noble imagery

His slowly-falling round

Down to the fishy sea.

Here was a sovereign sight,

Fit for a kinky clan.

Tell me again of the point

At which the flight began,

Say how his heavy wings,

Spread on the sun-bronzed air,

Turned tip and tip away,

Down to the sand, the glare

Of the pine trees edging the sand,

Dropping in sovereign rings

Out of his fiery lair.

Speak of the dazzling wings.

Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue

I

The thing is dead … Everything is dead

Except the future. Always everything

That is is dead except what ought to be.

All things destroy themselves or are destroyed.

These are not even Russian animals.

They are horses as they were in the sculptor’s mind.

They might be sugar or paste or citron-skin

Made by a cook that never rode the back

Of his angel through the skies. They might be mud

Left here by moonlit muckers when they fled

At the burst of day, crepuscular images

Made to remember a life they never lived

In the witching wilderness, night’s witchingness,

Made to affect a dream they never had,

Like a word in the mind that sticks at artichoke

And remains inarticulate, horses with cream.

The statue seems a thing from Schwarz’s, a thing

Of the dank imagination, much below

Our crusted outlines hot and huge with fact,

Ugly as an idea, not beautiful

As sequels without thought. In the rudest red

Of autumn, these horses should go clattering

Along the thin horizons, nobly more

Than this jotting-down of the sculptor’s foppishness

Long after the worms and the curious carvings of

Their snouts.

II

Come, all celestial paramours,

Whether in-dwelling haughty clouds, frigid

And crisply musical, or holy caverns temple-toned,

Entwine your arms and moving to and fro,

Now like a ballet infantine in awkward steps,

Chant sibilant requiems for this effigy.

Bring down from nowhere nothing’s wax-like blooms,

Calling them what you will but loosely-named

In a mortal lullaby, like porcelain.

Then, while the music makes you, make, yourselves,

Long autumn sheens and pittering sounds like sounds

On pattering leaves and suddenly with lights,

Astral and Shelleyan, diffuse new day;

And on this ring of marble horses shed

The rainbow in its glistening serpentines

Made by the sun ascending seventy seas.

Agree: the apple in the orchard, round

And red, will not be redder, rounder then