5
Impatient tireless undirected feet!
So confident on wrinkled ways of wrong.
On what remote frontier of heaven and hell
Shall time allow our divers paths to meet?
Yet you do well to run the roads you run,
10
Yes you do well to keep the ways you keep;
And we who seek to balance pleasure and pain
We blow against the wind and spit against the rain:
For what could be more real than sweat and dust and sun?
And what more sure than night and death and sleep?
15
Appearances appearances he said,
I have searched the world through dialectic ways;
I have questioned restless nights and torpid days,
And followed every by-way where it led;
And always find the same unvaried
20
Intolerable interminable maze.
Contradiction is the debt you would collect
And still with contradiction are you paid,
And while you do not know what else you seek
You shall have nothing other to expect.
25
Appearances, appearances, he said,
And nowise real; unreal, and yet true;
Untrue, yet real;—of what are you afraid?
Hopeful of what? whether you keep thanksgiving,
Or pray for earth on tired body and head,
30
This word is true on all the paths you tread
As true as truth need be, when all is said:
That if you find no truth among the living
You will not find much truth among the dead.
No other time but now, no other place than here, he said.
[Commentary I 1137–40 · Textual History II 579–80]
35
He drew the shawl about him as he spoke
And dozed in his arm-chair till the morning broke.
Across the window panes the plumes of lilac swept
Stirred by the morning air.
Across the floor the shadows crawled and crept
40
And as the thin light shivered through the trees
Around the muffled form they danced and leapt.
They crawled about his shoulders and his knees;
They rested for a moment on his hair
Until the morning drove them to their lair.
45
And then sprang up a little damp dead breeze
That rattled at the window while he slept,
And had those been human voices in the chimneys
And at the shutters, and along the stair,
You had not known whether they laughed or wept.
[Commentary I 1140–44 · Textual History II 580–82]
The Love Song of St. Sebastian
I would come in a shirt of hair
I would come with a lamp in the night
And sit at the foot of your stair;
I would flog myself until I bled,
5
And after hour on hour of prayer
And torture and delight
Until my blood should ring the lamp
And glisten in the light
I should arise your neophyte
10
And then put out the light
To follow where you led,
To follow where your feet are white
In the darkness toward your bed
And where your gown is white
15
And against your gown your braided hair.
Then you would take me in
Because I was hideous in your sight
You would take me in without shame
Because I should be dead
20
And when the morning came
Between your breasts should lie my head.
I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your ears curl back in a certain way
25
Like no one’s else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
30
And follow the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees—
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
35
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I had mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.
[Commentary I 1144–45 · Textual History II 582]
Paysage Triste
The girl who mounted in the omnibus
The rainy day, and paid a penny fare
Who answered my appreciative stare
With that averted look without surprise
5
Which only the experienced can wear
A girl with reddish hair and faint blue eyes
An almost denizen of Leicester Square.
We could not have had her in the box with us
She would not have known how to sit, or what to wear
10
Yet if I close my eyes I see her moving
With loosened hair about her chamber
With naked feet passing across the skies
She would have been most crudely ill at ease
She would not have known how to sit, or what to wear
15
Nor, when the lights went out and the horn began
Have leaned as you did, your elbow on my knees
To prod impetuously with your fan
The smiling stripling with the pink soaped face
Who had your opera-glasses in his care.
Afternoon
The ladies who are interested in Assyrian art
Gather in the hall of the British Museum.
The faint perfume of last year’s tailor suits
And the steam from drying rubber overshoes
5
And the green and purple feathers on their hats
Vanish in the sombre Sunday afternoon
<
[Commentary I 1145–48 · Textual History II 583]
As they fade beyond the Roman statuary
Like amateur comedians across a lawn
Towards the unconscious, the ineffable, the absolute
Suppressed Complex
She lay very still in bed with stubborn eyes
Holding her breath lest she begin to think.
I was a shadow upright in the corner
Dancing joyously in the firelight.
5
She stirred in her sleep and clutched the blanket with her fingers
She was very pale and breathed hard.
When morning shook the long nasturtium creeper in the tawny bowl
I passed joyously out through the window.
In the Department Store
The lady of the porcelain department
Smiles at the world through a set of false teeth.
She is business-like and keeps a pencil in her hair
But behind her sharpened eyes take flight
5
The summer evenings in the park
And heated nights in second story dance halls.
Man’s life is powerless and brief and dark
It is not possible for me to make her happy.
[Commentary I 1148–51 · Textual History II 583–84]
Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?
Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?
Let me take ink and paper, let me take pen and ink …
Or with my hat and gloves, as if to take the air
Walk softly down the hall, stop at the foot of the stair
5
Take my letters from the porter—ask him for a drink
If I questioned him with care, would he tell me what I think and feel
—Or only ‘You are the gentleman who has lived on the second floor
For a year or more’—
Yet I dread what a flash of madness might reveal
10
If he said ‘Sir we have seen so much beauty spilled on the open street
Or wasted in stately marriages or stained in railway carriages
Or left untasted in villages or stifled in darkened chambers
That if we are restless on winter nights, who can blame us?’
Do I know how I feel? Do I know how I think?
15
There is something which should be firm but slips, just at my finger tips.
There will be a smell of creolin and the sound of something that drips
A black bag with a pointed beard and tobacco on his breath
With chemicals and a knife
Will investigate the cause of death that was also the cause of the life—
20
Would there be a little whisper in the brain
A new assertion of the ancient pain
Or would this other touch the secret which I cannot find?
My brain is twisted in a tangled skein
There will be a blinding light and a little laughter
25
And the sinking blackness of ether
I do not know what, after, and I do not care either
[Commentary I 1151–54 · Textual History II 584–85]
The Death of Saint Narcissus
Come under the shadow of this gray rock—
Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or
5
Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock:
I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs
And the gray shadow on his lips.
He walked once between the sea and the high cliffs
When the wind made him aware of his limbs smoothly passing each other
10
And of his arms crossed over his breast.
When he walked over the meadows
He was stifled and soothed by his own rhythm.
By the river
His eyes were aware of the pointed corners of his eyes
15
And his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers.
Struck down by such knowledge
He could not live men’s ways, but became a dancer before God.
If he walked in city streets
He seemed to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees.
20
So he came out under the rock.
First he was sure that he had been a tree,
Twisting its branches among each other
And tangling its roots among each other.
Then he knew that he had been a fish
25
With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers,
Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty
Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.
>
[Commentary I 1154–57 · Textual History II 585–86]
Then he had been a young girl
Caught in the woods by a drunken old man
30
Knowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness
The horror of his own smoothness,
And he felt drunken and old.
So he became a dancer to God.
Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows
35
He danced on the hot sand
Until the arrows came.
As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him.
Now he is green, dry and stained
With the shadow in his mouth.
To Helen
While you were absent in the lavatory
There came a negro with broad flat eyes
Bringing a dish with oranges and bananas,
And another brought coffee and cigars.
5
I was impatient, my dear, and a little unhappy
Needing your large mouth opposite me.
I hung suspended on the finger bowl
Till a white rabbit hopped around the corner
And twitched his nose toward the crumbs.
After the turning of the inspired days
After the praying and the silence and the crying
And the inevitable ending of a thousand ways
And frosty vigil kept in withered gardens
5
After the life and death of lonely places
After the judges and the advocates and wardens
And the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the turning of inspired nights
And the shaking spears and flickering lights—
10
After the living and the dying—
[Commentary I 1157–59 · Textual History II 586–87]
After the ending of this inspiration
And the torches and the faces and the shouting
The world seemed futile—like a Sunday outing.
I am the Resurrection and the Life
I am the Resurrection and the Life
I am the things that stop, and those that flow.
I am the husband and the wife
And the victim and the sacrificial knife
5
I am the fire, and the butter also.
So through the evening, through the violet air
So through the evening, through the violet air
One tortured meditation dragged me on
Concatenated words from which the sense seemed gone—
—When comes, to the sleeping or the wake
5
The This-do-ye-for-my-sake
When to the sullen sunbaked houses and the trees
The one essential word that frees
The inspiration that delivers and expresses
This wrinkled road which twists and winds and guesses:
10
Oh, through the violet sky, through the evening air
A chain of reasoning whereof the thread was gone
Gathered strange images through which we walked alone:
>
[Commentary I 1159–61 · Textual History II 587–88]
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper-music on those strings
15
The shrill bats quivered through the violet air
Whining, and beating wings.
A man, distorted by some mental blight
Yet of abnormal powers
I saw him creep head downward down a wall
20
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells.
And there were chanting voices out of cisterns and of wells.
My feverish impulsions gathered head
A man lay flat upon his back, and cried
25
‘It seems that I have been a long time dead:
Do not report me to the established world
It has seen strange revolutions since I died’.
As a deaf mute swimming deep below the surface
Knowing neither up nor down, swims down and down
30
In the calm deep water where no stir nor surf is
Swims down and down;
And about his hair the seaweed purple and brown.
So in our fixed confusion we persisted, out from town.
Introspection
The mind was six feet deep in a cistern and a brown snake with a triangular head having swallowed his tail was struggling like two fists interlocked. His
head slipped along 5 the brick wall, scraping at the cracks.
[Commentary I 1161–62 · Textual History II 588–89]
The Engine
I
The engine hammered and hummed. Flat faces of American business men lay along the tiers of chairs in one plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a six-penny magazine. The machine was hard, deliberate, and alert; having chosen with motives and ends unknown to cut through the fog it pursued its course; the life of the deck stirred and was silent like a restless scale on the smooth surface. The machine was certain and sufficient as a rose bush, indifferently justifying the aimless parasite. II
After the engine stopped, I lay in bed listening while the wash subsided and the scuffle of feet died out. The music ceased, but a mouth organ from the steerage picked up the tune. I switched on the light, only to see on the wall a spider taut as a drumhead, the life of endless geological periods concentrated into a small spot of intense apathy at my feet. ‘And if the ship goes down’ I thought drowsily ‘he is prepared and will somehow persist, for he is very old. But the flat faces …’ I tried to assemble these nebulae into one pattern. Failing, I roused myself to hear the machine recommence, and then the music, and the feet upon the deck.
[Commentary I 1162–65 · Textual History II 589–90]
Hidden under the heron’s wing
Hidden under the heron’s wing
Or the song before daybreak that the lotos-birds sing
Evening whisper of stars together
Oh my beloved what do you bring—
5
With evening feet walking across the grass
And fragile arms dividing the evening mist.
I lie on the floor a bottle’s broken glass