Than now. No: nor the ploughman in his bed

Be free to sleep there sounder, for the plough

And the dew and the ploughman still will best be one.

But this gawky plaster will not be here.

III

The stones

That will replace it shall be carved, “The Mass

Appoints These Marbles Of Itself To Be

Itself.” No more than that, no subterfuge,

No memorable muffing, bare and blunt.

IV

Mesdames, one might believe that Shelley lies

Less in the stars than in their earthy wake,

Since the radiant disclosures that you make

Are of an eternal vista, manqué and gold

And brown, an Italy of the mind, a place

Of fear before the disorder of the strange,

A time in which the poets’ politics

Will rule in a poets’ world. Yet that will be

A world impossible for poets, who

Complain and prophesy, in their complaints,

And are never of the world in which they live.

Disclose the rude and ruddy at their jobs

And if you weep for peacocks that are gone

Or dance the death of doves, most sallowly,

Who knows? The ploughman may not live alone

With his plough, the peacock may abandon pride,

The dove’s adagio may lose its depth

And change. If ploughmen, peacocks, doves alike

In vast disorder live in the ruins, free,

The charts destroyed, even disorder may,

So seen, have an order of its own, a peace

Not now to be perceived yet order’s own.

V

A solemn voice, not Mr. Burnshaw’s says:

At some gigantic, solitary urn,

A trash can at the end of the world, the dead

Give up dead things and the living turn away.

There buzzards pile their sticks among the bones

Of buzzards and eat the bellies of the rich,

Fat with a thousand butters, and the crows

Sip the wild honey of the poor man’s life,

The blood of his bitter brain; and there the sun

Shines without fire on columns intercrossed,

White slapped on white, majestic, marble heads,

Severed and tumbled into seedless grass,

Motionless, knowing neither dew nor frost.

There lies the head of the sculptor in which the thought

Of lizards, in its eye, is more acute

Than the thought that once was native to the skull;

And there are the white-maned horses’ heads, beyond

The help of any wind or any sky:

Parts of the immense detritus of a world

That is completely waste, that moves from waste

To waste, out of the hopeless waste of the past

Into a hopeful waste to come. There even

The colorless light in which this wreckage lies

Has faint, portentous lustres, shades and shapes

Of rose, or what will once more rise to rose,

When younger bodies, because they are younger, rise

And chant the rose-points of their birth, and when

For a little time, again, rose-breasted birds

Sing rose-beliefs. Above that urn two lights

Commingle, not like the commingling of sun and moon

At dawn, nor of summer-light and winter-light

In an autumn afternoon, but two immense