Painted by mad-men, seen as magic,

Leafed out in adjectives as private

And peculiar and appropriate glory,

Even enthroned on rainbows in the sight

Of the fishes of the sea, the colored

Birds and people of this too voluminous

Air-earth—Can we live on dry descriptions,

Feel everything starving except the belly

And nourish ourselves on crumbs of whimsy?

XI

But a profane parade, the basso

Preludes a-rub, a-rub-rub, for him that

Led the emperor astray, the tom trumpets

Curling round the steeple and the people,

The elephants of sound, the tigers

In trombones roaring for the children,

Young boys resembling pastry, hip-hip,

Young men as vegetables, hip-hip,

Home and the fields give praise, hurrah, hip,

Hip, hip, hurrah. Eternal morning …

Flesh on the bones. The skeleton throwing

His crust away eats of this meat, drinks

Of this tabernacle, this communion,

Sleeps in the sun no thing recalling.

XII

It is not an image. It is a feeling.

There is no image of the hero.

There is a feeling as definition.

How could there be an image, an outline,

A design, a marble soiled by pigeons?

The hero is a feeling, a man seen

As if the eye was an emotion,

As if in seeing we saw our feeling

In the object seen and saved that mystic

Against the sight, the penetrating,

Pure eye. Instead of allegory,

We have and are the man, capable

Of his brave quickenings, the human

Accelerations that seem inhuman.

XIII

These letters of him for the little,

The imaginative, ghosts that dally

With life’s salt upon their lips and savor

The taste of it, secrete within them

Too many references. The hero

Acts in reality, adds nothing

To what he does. He is the heroic

Actor and act but not divided.

It is a part of his conception,

That he be not conceived, being real.

Say that the hero is his nation,

In him made one, and in that saying

Destroy all references. This actor

Is anonymous and cannot help it.

XIV

A thousand crystals’ chiming voices,

Like the shiddow-shaddow of lights revolving

To momentary ones, are blended,

In hymns, through iridescent changes,

Of the apprehending of the hero.

These hymns are like a stubborn brightness

Approaching in the dark approaches

Of time and place, becoming certain,

The organic centre of responses,

Naked of hindrance, a thousand crystals.

To meditate the highest man, not

The highest supposed in him and over,

Creates, in the blissfuller perceptions,

What unisons create in music.

XV

The highest man with nothing higher

Than himself, his self, the self that embraces

The self of the hero, the solar single,

Man-sun, man-moon, man-earth, man-ocean,

Makes poems on the syllable fa or

Jumps from the clouds or, from his window,

Sees the petty gildings on February …

The man-sun being hero rejects that

False empire … These are the works and pastimes

Of the highest self: he studies the paper

On the wall, the lemons on the table.

This is his day. With nothing lost, he