Arrives at the man-man as he wanted.

This is his night and meditation.

XVI

Each false thing ends. The bouquet of summer

Turns blue and on its empty table

It is stale and the water is discolored.

True autumn stands then in the doorway.

After the hero, the familiar

Man makes the hero artificial.

But was the summer false? The hero?

How did we come to think that autumn

Was the veritable season, that familiar

Man was the veritable man? So

Summer, jangling the savagest diamonds and

Dressed in its azure-doubled crimsons,

May truly bear its heroic fortunes

For the large, the solitary figure.

[Prose statement on the poetry of war]

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one’s thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic.

It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is over-whelming.

Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be.

—W. S.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

TO HENRY CHURCH

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?

Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,

Equal in living changingness to the light

In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

For a moment in the central of our being,

The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

It Must Be Abstract

I

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea

Of this invention, this invented world,

The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again

And see the sun again with an ignorant eye

And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as source

Of this idea nor for that mind compose

A voluminous master folded in his fire.