Collected Earlier Poems (9 page)

Though learned men have been at some dispute

Touching the taste and color, nature, name

And properties of the Original Fruit,

The bees that in midsummer congress swarm

In futile search of apple blossoms can

Testify to a sweetness such as man

Fears in his freezing heart, yet it could warm

Winter away, and redden the cheek with shame.

There was a gentleman of severest taste

Who won from wickedness by consummate strife

A sensibility suitable to his chaste

Formula. He found the world too lavish.

Temptation was his constant, intimate foe,

Constantly to be overcome by force, and so

His formula (fearing lest the world ravish

His senses) applied the rigors of art to life.

But in recurrent dreams saw himself dead,

Mourned by chrysanthemums that walked about,

Each bending over him its massive head

And weeping on him such sweet tender tears

That as each drop spattered upon his limbs

Green plant life blossomed in that place. For hymns

Marking his mean demise, his frigid ears

Perceived the belch of frogs, low and devout.

The problem is not simple. In Guadeloupe

The fer-de-lance displays his ugly trait

Deep in the sweaty undergrowth where droop

Pears of a kind not tasted, where depend

Strange apples, in the shade of
Les Mamelles
.

The place is neither Paradise nor Hell,

But of their divers attributes a blend:

It is man’s brief and natural estate.

Samuel Sewall, in a world of wigs,

Flouted opinion in his personal hair;

For foppery he gave not any figs,

But in his right and honor took the air.

Thus in his naked style, though well attired,

He went forth in the city, or paid court

To Madam Winthrop, whom he much admired,

Most godly, but yet liberal with the port.

And all the town admired for two full years

His excellent address, his gifts of fruit,

Her gracious ways and delicate white ears,

And held the course of nature absolute.

But yet she bade him suffer a peruke,

“That One be not distinguished from the All”;

Delivered of herself this stern rebuke

Framed in the resonant language of St. Paul.

“Madam,” he answered her, “I have a Friend

Furnishes me with hair out of His strength,

And He requires only I attend

Unto His charity and to its length.”

And all the town was witness to his trust:

On Monday he walked out with the Widow Gibbs,

A pious lady of charm and notable bust,

Whose heart beat tolerably beneath her ribs.

On Saturday he wrote proposing marriage,

And closed, imploring that she be not cruel,

“Your favorable answer will oblige,

Madam, your humble servant, Samuel Sewall.”

A toast to that lady over the fireplace

Who wears a snood of pearls. Her eyes are turned

Away from the posterity that loosed

Drunken invaders to the living room,

Toppled the convent bell-tower, and burned

The sniper-ridden outhouses. The face

Of Beatrice d’Este, reproduced

In color, offers a profile to this dark,

Hand-carved interior. High German gloom

Flinches before our boots upon the desk

Where the
Ortsgruppenführer
used to park

His sovereign person. Not a week ago

The women of this house went down among

The stacked-up kindling wood, the picturesque,

Darkening etchings of Vesuvius,

Piled mattresses upon themselves, and shook,

And prayed to God in their guttural native tongue

For mercy, forgiveness, and the death of us.

We are indeed diminished.

                                        We are twelve.

But have recaptured a sufficiency

Of France’s cognac; and it shall be well,

Given sufficient time, if we can down

Half of it, being as we are, reduced.

Five dead in the pasture, yet they loom

As thirstily as ever. Are recalled

By daring wagers to this living room:

“I’ll be around to leak over your grave.”

And
Durendal
, my only
Durendal
,

Thou hast preserved me better than a sword;

Rest in the enemy umbrella stand

While that I measure out another drink.

I am beholden to thee, by this hand,

This measuring hand. We are beholden all.

Held in her hand of “almost flawless skin”

A small sprig of Sweet William as a badge

Of beauty, and the region of her nose

Seemed to be made so delicate and thin,

Light of the sun might touch the cartilage

With numerous golden tones and hints of rose

If she but turned to the window now to smell

The lilacs and the undulant green lawn,

Trim as a golf course, where a haze revealed

The sheep, distinguished each with a separate bell,

Grazing and moping near the neighbor field

Where all the clover-seeking bees were gone,

But stood in modesty in the full sight

Of Memling, whose accomplished busy hand

Rendered this wimpled lady in such white

Untinted beauty, that she seems to stand

Even as gently to our present gaze

As she had stood there in her breathing days.

Seeing this painting, I am put in mind

Of many a freakish harridan and clown

Who by their native clumsiness or fate

Won for themselves astonishing renown

And stand amongst us even to this date

Since art and history were so inclined:

Here, in a generous Italian scene,

A pimpled, chinless shepherd, whose rough thought

And customary labor lead the ram

Into his sheep for profit and for sport,

Guide their ungainly pleasure with obscene

Mirth at the comedy of sire and dam

Till he has grossly married every ewe—

This shepherd, in a mangy cap of fur,

Stands at the window still regarding her,

That only lady, if the Pope speaks true,

Who with a grace more than we understand

Ate of her portion with a flawless hand.

And once a chattering agent of Pope Paul,

A small, foul-minded clergyman, stood by

To watch the aging Michelangelo

Set his
Last Judgment
on the papal wall,

And muttered thereupon that to his eye

It was a lewd and most indecent show

Of nakedness, not for a sacred place,

Fitted to whorehouse or to public bath;

At which the painter promptly drew his face

Horribly gripped, his face a fist of pain,

Amongst those fixed in God’s eternal wrath,

And when the fool made motion to complain

He earned this solemn judgment of the Pope:

“Had art set you on Purgatory’s Mount

Then had I done my utmost for your hope,

But Hell’s fierce immolation takes no count

Of offices and prayers, for as you know,

From that place
nulla est redemptio
.”

And I recall certain ambassadors,

Cuffed all in ermine and with vests of mail

Who came their way into the town of Prague

Announced by horns, as history tells the tale,

To seek avoidances of future wars

And try the meaning of the Decalogue,

But whispers went about against their names.

And so it happened that a courtier-wit,

Hating their cause with an intemperate might,

Lauded his castle’s vantage, and made claims

Upon their courtesy to visit it,

And having brought them to that famous height

To witness the whole streamed and timbered view

Of his ancestral property, and smell

His fine ancestral air, he pushed them through

The open-standing window, whence they fell,

Oh, in a manner worthy to be sung,

Full thirty feet into a pile of dung.

How many poets, with profoundest breath,

Have set their ladies up to spite the worm,

So that pale mistress or high-busted bawd

Could smile and spit into the eye of death

And dance into our midst all fleshed and firm

Despite she was most perishably flawed?

She lasts, but not in her own body’s right,

Nor do we love her for her endless poise.

All of her beauty has become a part

Of neighboring beauty, and what could excite

High expectations among hopeful boys

Now leaves her to the nunnery of art.

And yet a searching discipline can keep

That eye still clear, as though in spite of Hell,

So that she seems as innocent as sheep

Where they still graze, denuded of their smell,

Where fool still writhes upon the chapel wall,

A shepherd stares, ambassadors still fall.

Adam and Eve knew such perfection once,

God’s finger in the cloud, and on the ground

Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all.

But in our fallen state where the blood hunts

For blood, and rises at the hunting sound,

What do we know of lasting since the fall?

Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth,

Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree,

The grasshopper, and the failing of desire,

And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecy

Of the six-pointed starlight, and might choir

A secret-voweled, unutterable truth?

The heart is ramified with an old force

(Outlingering the blood, out of the sway

Of its own fleshy trap) that finds its source

Deep in the phosphorous waters of the bay,

Or in the wind, or pointing cedar tree,

Or its own ramified complexity.

Darkness is for the poor, and thorough cold,

As they go wandering the hills at night,

Gunning for enemies. Winter locks the lake;

The rocks are harder for it. What was grass

Is fossilized and brittle; it can hurt,

Being a torture to the kneeling knee,

And in the general pain of cold, it sticks

Particular pain where crawling is required.

Christmas is coming. The goose is getting fat.
Please put a penny in the Old Man’s hat
.

Where is the warmth of blood? The enemy

Has ears that can hear clearly in the cold,

Can hear the shattering of fossil grass,

Can hear the stiff cloth rub against itself,

Making a sound. Where is the blood? It lies

Locked in the limbs of some poor animal

In a diaspora of crimson ice.

The skin freezes to metal. One must crawl

Quietly in the dark. Where is the warmth?

The lamb has yielded up its fleece and warmth

And woolly life, but who shall taste of it?

Here on the ground one cannot see the stars.

The lamb is killed.
The goose is getting fat
.

A wind blows steadily against the trees,

And somewhere in the blackness they are black.

Yet crawling one encounters bits of string,

Pieces of foil left by the enemy.

(A rifle takes its temper from the cold.)

Where is the pain? The sense has frozen up,

And fingers cannot recognize the grass,

Cannot distinguish their own character,

Being blind with cold, being stiffened by the cold;

Must find out thistles to remember pain.

Keep to the frozen ground or else be killed.

Yet crawling one encounters in the dark

The frosty carcasses of birds, their feet

And wings all glazed. And still we crawl to learn

Where pain was lost, how to recover pain.

Reach for the brambles, crawl to them and reach,

Clutching for thorns, search carefully to feel

The point of thorns, life’s crown,
the Old Man’s hat
.

Yet quietly. Do not disturb the brambles.

Winter has taught the air to clarify

All noises, and the enemy can hear

Perfectly in the cold. Nothing but sound

Is known. Where is the warmth and pain?

Christmas is coming
. Darkness is for the poor.

If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do
,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, God bless you.

Let men take note of her, touching her shyness,

How grace informs and presses the brocade

Wherein her benefits are whitely stayed,

And think all glittering enterprise, and highness

Of blood or deed were yet in something minus

Lacking the wide approval of her mouth,

And to betoken every man his drouth,

Drink, in her name, all tankards to their dryness.

Wanting her clear perfection, how may tongues

Manifest what no language understands?

Yet as her beauty evermore commands

Even the tanager with tiny lungs

To flush all silence, may she by these songs

Know it was love I looked for at her hands.

                         This is Italian. Here

               Is cause for the undiminished bounce

    Of sex, cause for the lark, the animal spirit

To rise, aerated, but not beyond our reach, to spread

Friction upon the air, cause to sing loud for the bed

    Of jonquils, the linen bed, and established merit

               Of love, and grandly to pronounce

                         Pleasure without peer.