Red-in-red repetitions never going

Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,

A little roughened and ruder, a crown

The eye could not escape, a red renown

Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.

An effulgence faded, dull cornelian

Too venerably used. That might have been.

It might and might have been. But as it was,

A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell

And bade the sheep carouse. Or so they said.

Children in love with them brought early flowers

And scattered them about, no two alike.

IV

We reason of these things with later reason

And we make of what we see, what we see clearly

And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

There was a mystic marriage in Catawba,

At noon it was on the mid-day of the year

Between a great captain and the maiden Bawda.

This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon

We loved but would no marriage make. Anon

The one refused the other one to take,

Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.

Each must the other take not for his high,

His puissant front nor for her subtle sound,

The shoo-shoo-shoo of secret cymbals round.

Each must the other take as sign, short sign

To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

The great captain loved the ever-hill Catawba

And therefore married Bawda, whom he found there,

And Bawda loved the captain as she loved the sun.

They married well because the marriage-place

Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.

They were love’s characters come face to face.

V

We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango

Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed

Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy

She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one

Of four, and one of seven, whom she dressed

The way a painter of pauvred color paints.

But still she painted them, appropriate to

Their poverty, a gray-blue yellowed out

With ribbon, a rigid statement of them, white,

With Sunday pearls, her widow’s gayety.

She hid them under simple names. She held

Them closelier to her by rejecting dreams.

The words they spoke were voices that she heard.

She looked at them and saw them as they were

And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

The Canon Aspirin, having said these things,

Reflected, humming an outline of a fugue

Of praise, a conjugation done by choirs.

Yet when her children slept, his sister herself

Demanded of sleep, in the excitements of silence

Only the unmuddled self of sleep, for them.

VI

When at long midnight the Canon came to sleep

And normal things had yawned themselves away,

The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,

Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.

Thereon the learning of the man conceived

Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold

Beneath, far underneath, the surface of

His eye and audible in the mountain of

His ear, the very material of his mind.

So that he was the ascending wings he saw

And moved on them in orbits’ outer stars