As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes

Made sharp air sharper by their smell

These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion’s look

And what we said of it became

A part of what it is … Children,

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems

As if he that lived there left behind

A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Ghosts as Cocoons

The grass is in seed. The young birds are flying.

Yet the house is not built, not even begun.

The vetch has turned purple. But where is the bride?

It is easy to say to those bidden—But where,

Where, butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller,

Where is sun and music and highest heaven’s lust,

For which more than any words cries deeplier?

This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out

Of dirt … It is not possible for the moon

To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

She must come now. The grass is in seed and high.

Come now. Those to be born have need

Of the bride, love being a birth, have need to see

And to touch her, have need to say to her,

“The fly on the rose prevents us, O season

Excelling summer, ghost of fragrance falling

On dung.” Come now, pearled and pasted, bloomy-leafed,

While the domes resound with chant involving chant.

The Men That Are Falling

God and all angels sing the world to sleep,

Now that the moon is rising in the heat

And crickets are loud again in the grass. The moon

Burns in the mind on lost remembrances.

He lies down and the night wind blows upon him here.

The bells grow longer. This is not sleep. This is desire.

Ah! Yes, desire … this leaning on his bed,

This leaning on his elbows on his bed,

Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black

In the catastrophic room … beyond despair,

Like an intenser instinct. What is it he desires?

But this he cannot know, the man that thinks,

Yet life itself, the fulfilment of desire

In the grinding ric-rac, staring steadily

At a head upon the pillow in the dark,

More than sudarium, speaking the speech

Of absolutes, bodiless, a head

Thick-lipped from riot and rebellious cries,

The head of one of the men that are falling, placed

Upon the pillow to repose and speak,

Speak and say the immaculate syllables

That he spoke only by doing what he did.

God and all angels, this was his desire,