The final elegance, not to console

Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

It Must Change

I

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets

Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves

Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair

And these the seraph saw, had seen long since,

In the bandeaux of the mothers, would see again.

The bees came booming as if they had never gone,

As if hyacinths had never gone. We say

This changes and that changes. Thus the constant

Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths

Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause

In a universe of inconstancy. This means

Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph

Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

It means the distaste we feel for this withered scene

Is that it has not changed enough. It remains,

It is a repetition. The bees come booming

As if—The pigeons clatter in the air.

An erotic perfume, half of the body, half

Of an obvious acid is sure what it intends

And the booming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.

II

The President ordains the bee to be

Immortal. The President ordains. But does

The body lift its heavy wing, take up,

Again, an inexhaustible being, rise

Over the loftiest antagonist

To drone the green phrases of its juvenal?

Why should the bee recapture a lost blague,

Find a deep echo in a horn and buzz

The bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old?

The President has apples on the table

And barefoot servants round him, who adjust

The curtains to a metaphysical t

And the banners of the nation flutter, burst

On the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack

At the halyards. Why, then, when in golden fury

Spring vanishes the scraps of winter, why

Should there be a question of returning or

Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?

This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing

Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this

Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

III

The great statue of the General Du Puy

Rested immobile, though neighboring catafalques

Bore off the residents of its noble Place.

The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse

Suggested that, at the final funeral,

The music halted and the horse stood still.

On Sundays, lawyers in their promenades

Approached this strongly-heightened effigy

To study the past, and doctors, having bathed

Themselves with care, sought out the nerveless frame

Of a suspension, a permanence, so rigid

That it made the General a bit absurd,

Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.

There never had been, never could be, such

A man. The lawyers disbelieved, the doctors

Said that as keen, illustrious ornament,

As a setting for geraniums, the General,

The very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged

Among our more vestigial states of mind.

Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.

Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

IV

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend

On one another, as a man depends