Held in the vise of sense about to die.
1950
THE HOUSE AT THE CASCADES
All changed now through neglect. The steps dismantled
By infantries of ants, by roots and storms,
The pillars tugged by vines, the porte-cochère
A passageway for winds, the solemn porches
Warped into caricatures.
We came at evening
After the rain, when every drunken leaf
Was straining, swelling in a riot of green.
Only the house was dying in all that life,
As if a triumph of emerald energy
Had fixed its mouth upon the walls and stones.
The tamest shrub remembered anarchy
And joined in appetite with the demagogue weed
That springs where order falls; together there
They stormed the defenseless handiwork of man
Whose empire wars against him when he turns
A moment from the yoke. So, turning back,
He sees his rooftree fall to furious green,
His yard despoiled, and out of innocent noon
The insect-cloud like thunder on the land.
1951
THE DIAMOND
CUTTERS
(1955)
For A.H.C.
THE ROADWAY
When the footbridge washes away,
And the lights along the bank
Accost each other no longer,
But the wild grass grows up rank,
And no one comes to stand
Where neighbor and neighbor stood,
And each house is drawn in to itself
And shuttered against the road,
Under each separate roof
The familiar life goes on:
The hearth is swept up at night,
The table laid in the dawn,
And man and woman and child
Eat their accustomed meal,
Give thanks and turn to their day
As if by an act of will.
Nowhere is evil spoken,
Though something deep in the heart
Refuses to mend the bridge
And can never make a start
Along the abandoned path
To the house at left or at right,
Where neighbor and neighbor’s children
Awake to the same daylight.
Good men grown long accustomed
To inflexible ways of mind—
Which of them could say clearly
What first drove kind from kind?
Courteous to any stranger,
Forbearing with wife and child—
Yet along the common roadway
The wild grass still grows wild.
PICTURES BY VUILLARD
Now we remember all: the wild pear-tree,
The broken ribbons of the green-and-gold
Portfolio, with sketches from an old
Algerian campaign; the placid three
Women at coffee by the window, fates
Of nothing ominous, waiting for the ring
Of the postman’s bell; we harbor everything—
The cores of fruit left on the luncheon plates.
We are led back where we have never been,
Midday where nothing’s tragic, all’s delayed
As it should have been for us as well—that shade
Of summer always, Neuilly dappled green!
But we, the destined readers of Stendhal,
In monstrous change such consolations find
As restless mockery sets before the mind
To deal with what must anger and appall.
Much of the time we scarcely think of sighing
For afternoons that found us born too late.
Our prudent envy rarely paces spying
Under those walls, that lilac-shadowed gate.
Yet at this moment, in our private view,
A breath of common peace, like memory,
Rustles the branches of the wild pear-tree—
Air that we should have known, and cannot know.
ORIENT WHEAT
Our fathers in their books and speech
Have made the matter plain:
The green fields they walked in once
Will never grow again.
The corn lies under the locust’s tooth
Or blistered in the sun;
The faces of the old proud stock
Are gone where their years are gone.
The park where stags lay down at noon
Under the great trees
Is shrill with Sunday strollers now,
Littered with their lees.
Poachers have trampled down the maze
And choked the fountains dry;
The last swan of a score and ten
Goes among reeds to die.
We were born to smells of plague,
Chalk-marks on every door;
We never have heard the hunting-horn
Or feet on the gallery floor—
The high-arched feet of dancers
Who knew how to step and stand.
We were born of a leaning house
In a changed, uneasy land.
Our fathers curse the crooked time
And go to their graves at last;
While some of us laugh at doting men,
And others sigh for the past.
And the dazzled lovers lie
Where summer burns blue and green,
In the green fields they’ll be saying
Can never grow again.
VERSAILLES
(Petit Trianon)
Merely the landscape of a vanished whim,
An artifice that lasts beyond the wish:
The grotto by the pond, the gulping fish
That round and round pretended islands swim,
The creamery abandoned to its doves,
The empty shrine the guidebooks say is love’s.
What wind can bleaken this, what weather chasten
Those balustrades of stone, that sky stone-pale?
A fountain triton idly soaks his tail
In the last puddle of a drying basin;
A leisure that no human will can hasten
Drips from the hollow of his lifted shell.
When we were younger gardens were for games,
But now across the sungilt lawn of kings
We drift, consulting catalogues for names
Of postured gods: the cry of closing rings
For us and for the couples in the wood
And all good children who are all too good.
O children, next year, children, you will play
With only half your hearts; be wild today.
And lovers, take one long and fast embrace
Before the sun that tarnished queens goes down,
And evening finds you in a restless town
Where each has back his old restricted face.
ANNOTATION FOR AN EPITAPH
A fairer person lost not heaven.
—Paradise Lost
These are the sins for which they cast out angels,
The bagatelles by which the lovely fall:
A hand that disappoints, an eye dissembling—
These and a few besides: you had them all.
Beneath this cherubed stone reclines the beauty
That cherubs at the Chair will never see,
Shut out forever by the gold battalions
Stern to forgive, more rigorous than we.
Oh, we were quick to hide our eyes from foible
And call such beauty truth; what though we knew?
Never was truth so sweet and so outrageous;
We loved you all the more because untrue.
But in the baroque corridors of heaven
Your lively coming is a hope destroyed.
Squadrons of seraphs pass the news and ponder,
And all their luxury glitters grand and void.
IDEAL L
ANDSCAPE
We had to take the world as it was given:
The nursemaid sitting passive in the park
Was rarely by a changeling prince accosted.
The mornings happened similar and stark
In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay
Watching today unfold like yesterday.
Our friends were not unearthly beautiful,
Nor spoke with tongues of gold; our lovers blundered
Now and again when most we sought perfection,
Or hid in cupboards when the heavens thundered.
The human rose to haunt us everywhere,
Raw, flawed, and asking more than we could bear.
And always time was rushing like a tram
Through streets of a foreign city, streets we saw
Opening into great and sunny squares
We could not find again, no map could show—
Never those fountains tossed in that same light,
Those gilded trees, those statues green and white.
THE CELEBRATION
IN THE PLAZA
The sentimentalist sends his mauve balloon
Meandering into air. The crowd applauds.
The mayor eats ices with a cardboard spoon.
See how that color charms the sunset air;
A touch of lavender is what was needed.—
Then, pop! no floating lavender anywhere.
Hurrah, the pyrotechnic engineer
Comes with his sparkling tricks, consults the sky,
Waits for the perfect instant to appear.
Bouquets of gold splash into bloom and pour
Their hissing pollen downward on the dusk.
Nothing like this was ever seen before.
The viceroy of fireworks goes his way,
Leaving us with a sky so dull and bare
The crowd thins out: what conjures them to stay?
The road is cold with dew, and by and by
We see the constellations overhead.
But is that all? some little children cry.
All we have left, their pedagogues reply.
THE TOURIST AND THE TOWN
(San Miniato al Monte)
Those clarities detached us, gave us form,
Made us like architecture. Now no more
Bemused by local mist, our edges blurred,
We knew where we began and ended. There
We were the campanile and the dome,
Alive and separate in that bell-struck air,
Climate whose light reformed our random line,
Edged our intent and sharpened our desire.
Could it be always so—a week of sunlight,
Walks with a guidebook, picking out our way
Through verbs and ruins, yet finding after all
The promised vista, once!—The light has changed
Before we can make it ours. We have no choice:
We are only tourists under that blue sky,
Reading the posters on the station wall—
Come, take a walking-trip through happiness.
There is a mystery that floats between
The tourist and the town. Imagination
Estranges it from her. She need not suffer
Or die here. It is none of her affair,
Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.
Her bargains with disaster have been sealed
In another country. Here she goes untouched,
And this is alienation. Only sometimes
In certain towns she opens certain letters
Forwarded on from bitter origins,
That send her walking, sick and haunted, through
Mysterious and ordinary streets
That are no more than streets to walk and walk—
And then the tourist and the town are one.
To work and suffer is to be at home.
All else is scenery: the Rathaus fountain,
The skaters in the sunset on the lake
At Salzburg, or, emerging after snow,
The singular clear stars at Castellane.
To work and suffer is to come to know
The angles of a room, light in a square,
As convalescents know the face of one
Who has watched beside them. Yours now, every street,
The noonday swarm across the bridge, the bells
Bruising the air above the crowded roofs,
The avenue of chestnut-trees, the road
To the post-office. Once upon a time
All these for you were fiction. Now, made free
You live among them. Your breath is on this air,
And you are theirs and of their mystery.
BEARS
Wonderful bears that walked my room all night,
Where are you gone, your sleek and fairy fur,
Your eyes’ veiled imperious light?
Brown bears as rich as mocha or as musk,
White opalescent bears whose fur stood out
Electric in the deepening dusk,
And great black bears who seemed more blue than black,
More violet than blue against the dark—
Where are you now? upon what track
Mutter your muffled paws, that used to tread
So softly, surely, up the creakless stair
While I lay listening in bed?
Why do I wait and wait and never hear
Your thick nocturnal pacing in my room?
My bears, who keeps you now, in pride and fear?
THE INSUSCEPTIBLES
Then the long sunlight lying on the sea
Fell, folded gold on gold; and slowly we
Took up our decks of cards, our parasols,
The picnic hamper and the sandblown shawls
And climbed the dunes in silence. There were two
Who lagged behind as lovers sometimes do,
And took a different road. For us the night
Was final, and by artificial light
We came indoors to sleep. No envy there
Of those who might be watching anywhere
The lustres of the summer dark, to trace
Some vagrant splinter blazing out of space.
No thought of them, save in a lower room
To leave a light for them when they should come.
LUCIFER IN THE TRAIN
Riding the black express from heaven to hell
He bit his fingers, watched the countryside,
Vernal and crystalline, forever slide
Beyond his gaze: the long cascades that fell
Ribboned in sunshine from their sparkling height,
The fishers fastened to their pools of green
By silver lines; the birds in sudden flight—
All things the diabolic eye had seen
Since heaven’s cockcrow. Imperceptibly
That landscape altered: now in paler air
Tree, hill and rock stood out resigned, severe,
Beside the strangled field, the stream run dry.
Lucifer, we are yours who stiff and mute
Ride out of worlds we shall not see again,
And watch from windows of a smoking train
The ashen prairies of the absolute.
Once out of heaven, to an angel’s eye
Where is the bush or cloud without a flaw?
What bird but feeds upon mortality,
Flies to its young with carrion in its claw?
O foundered angel, first and loneliest
To turn this bitter sand beneath your hoe,
Teach us, the newly-landed, what you know;
After our weary transit, find us rest.
RECORDERS IN ITALY
It was amusing on that antique grass,
Seated halfway between the green and blue,
To waken music gentle and extinct
Under the old walls where the daisies grew
Sprinkled in cinquecento style
, as though
Archangels might have stepped there yesterday.
But it was we, mortal and young, who strolled
And fluted quavering music, for a day
Casual heirs of all we looked upon.
Such pipers of the emerald afternoon
Could only be the heirs of perfect time
When every leaf distinctly brushed with gold
Listened to Primavera speaking flowers.
Those scherzos stumble now; our journeys run
To harsher hillsides, rockier declensions.
Obligatory climates call us home.
And so shall clarity of cypresses,
Unfingered by necessity, become
Merely the ghost of half-remembered trees,
A trick of sunlight flattering the mind?—
There were four recorders sweet upon the wind.
AT HERTFORD HOUSE
Perfection now is tended and observed,
Not used; we hire the spawn of Caliban
For daily service. In our careful world
Inlay of purple-wood and tulip, curved
To mime the sheen of plumes and peacocks’ eyes,
Exists for inspection only. And the jars
Of apple-green and white, where wooing’s done
In panels after Boucher—such we prize
Too well to fill with roses. Chocolate, too,
Will not again be frothed in cups like these;
We move meticulously, ill at ease
Amid perfections. Why should a porcelain plaque
Where Venus pulls her pouting Adon on
Through beds of blushing flowers, seem unfit
For casual thumbprint? Ease is what we lack.
There’s a division nothing can make sweet
Between the clods of usage and the toys
We strum our senses with. But Antoinette
Ran her long tortoise-shell and silver comb