The mountain collapses. Chopiniana.

V

The common man is the common hero.

The common hero is the hero.

Imprimatur. But then there’s common fortune,

Induced by what you will: the entrails

Of a cat, twelve dollars for the devil,

A kneeling woman, a moon’s farewell;

And common fortune, induced by nothing,

Unwished for, chance, the merest riding

Of the wind, rain in a dry September,

The improvisations of the cuckoos

In a clock-shop.… Soldier, think, in the darkness,

Repeating your appointed paces

Between two neatly measured stations,

Of less neatly measured common-places.

VI

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there

To believe? Incisive what, the fellow

Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud,

For every day. In a civiler manner,

Devise, devise, and make him of winter’s

Iciest core, a north star, central

In our oblivion, of summer’s

Imagination, the golden rescue:

The bread and wine of the mind, permitted

In an ascetic room, its table

Red as a red table-cloth, its windows

West Indian, the extremest power

Living and being about us and being

Ours, like a familiar companion.

VII

Gazette Guerrière. A man might happen

To prefer L’Observateur de la Paix, since

The hero of the Gazette and the hero

Of L’Observateur, the classic hero

And the bourgeois, are different, much.

The classic changed. There have been many.

And there are many bourgeois heroes.

There are more heroes than marbles of them.

The marbles are pinchings of an idea,

Yet there is that idea behind the marbles,

The idea of things for public gardens,

Of men suited to public ferns … The hero

Glides to his meeting like a lover

Mumbling a secret, passionate message.

VIII

The hero is not a person. The marbles

Of Xenophon, his epitaphs, should

Exhibit Xenophon, what he was, since

Neither his head nor horse nor knife nor

Legend were part of what he was, forms

Of a still-life, symbols, brown things to think of

In brown books. The marbles of what he was stand

Like a white abstraction only, a feeling

In a feeling mass, a blank emotion,

An anti-pathos, until we call it

Xenophon, its implement and actor.

Obscure Satanas, make a model

Of this element, this force. Transfer it

Into a barbarism as its image.

IX

If the hero is not a person, the emblem

Of him, even if Xenophon, seems

To stand taller than a person stands, has

A wider brow, large and less human

Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body

Of a primitive. He walks with a defter

And lither stride. His arms are heavy

And his breast is greatness. All his speeches

Are prodigies in longer phrases.

His thoughts begotten at clear sources,

Apparently in air, fall from him

Like chantering from an abundant

Poet, as if he thought gladly, being

Compelled thereto by an innate music.

X

And if the phenomenon, magnified, is

Further magnified, sua voluntate,

Beyond his circumstance, projected

High, low, far, wide, against the distance,

In parades like several equipages,