Collected Poems, 1919 1976 Allen Tate

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.Vittoria was herself, the contemporary strumpetA plain bitch.For miracles are faintAnd resurrection is our weakest clause of religion,I have known men in my youth who foundered onThis point of doctrine: John Ransom, boasting hardyEntelechies yet botched in the head, lacking grace;Warren thirsty in Kentucky, his hair in the rain, asleep;None so unbaptized as Edmund Wilson the unwearied,That sly parody of the devil.They lacked doctrine;They waited.I, who watched out the first crisisWith them, wait:For the incredible image.NowI am told that Purusha sits no more in our eyes.Year after year the blood of Christ will sleepIn the holy tree, the branches sagged without bloomTill the plant overflowing the stale vegetationIn May the creek swells with the anemone,The Lord God wastes his substance towards the ocean.In Christ we have lived, on the flood of Christ borne up,Who now is a precipitate flood of silence,We a drenched wreck off an imponderable shore:A jagged cloud is our memory of shoreWhereon we figure hills below ultimate ranges.You cannot plot the tendency of man,Whither it leads is not mysteriousIn the various grave; but whence the impulseTo lust for the apple of apples on Christ’s tree,To desire in the eye, to penetrate your sleep,Perhaps to catch in unexpected leavesThe light incentive of your absolute suspicion?Over the mountains, the last barrier, you’d spillThese relics of your sires in a pool of sleep,The sun being drained.We have learned to requireIn the infirm concessions of memoryThe privilege never to hear too much.What is this conversation, now secular,A speech not mine yet speaking for me inThe heaving jelly of my tribal air?It rises in the throat, it climbs the tongue,It perches there for secret tutelageAnd gets it, of inscrutable instruction—Which is a puzzle like crepuscular lightThat has no visible source but fills the treesWith equal foliage, as if the upper leafNo less than the under were only imminent shade.Manhood like a lawyer with his formulasSesamés his youth for innocent acquittal.The essential wreckage of your age is different,The accident the same; the AnnabellaOf proper incest, no longer incestuous:In an age of abstract experience, fornicationIs self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria,And whores become delinquents; delinquents, patients;Patients, wards of society.Whores, by that rule,Are precious.Was it for this that LuciusBecame the ass of Thessaly? For this did KydUnlock the lion of passion on the stage?To litter a race of politic pimps? To glutThe Capitol with the progeny of thieves—Where now the antique courtesy of your mythsGoes in to sleep under a still shadow?1927IdiotThe idiot greens the meadow with his eyes,The meadow creeps implacable and still;A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies.One two three the cows bulge on the hill.Motion that is not time erects snowdriftsWhile sister’s hand sieves waterfalls of lace.With a palm fan closer than death he liftsThe Ozarks and tilted seas across his face.In the long sunset where impatient soundStrips niggers to a multiple of backsFlies yield their heat, magnolias drench the groundWith Appomattox! The shadows lie in stacks.The julep glass weaves echoes in Jim’s kinksWhile ashy Jim puts murmurs in the day;Now in the idiot’s heart a chamber stinksOf dead asters, as the potter’s field of May.All evening the marsh is a slick poolWhere dream wild hares, witch hazel, pretty girls.‘Up from the important picnic of a foolThose rotted asters!’ Eddy on eddy swirlsThe innocent mansion of a panther’s heart!It crumbles, tick-tick time drags it inTill now his arteries lag and now they startReverence with the frigid gusts of sin.The stillness pelts the eye, assaults the hair;A beech sticks out a branch to warn the stars,A lightning-bug jerks angles in the air,Diving.‘I am the captain of new wars!’The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail;Far off a precise whistle is escheatTo the dark; and then the towering weak and paleCovers his eyes with memory like a sheet.1927The SubwayDark accurate plunger down the successive knellOf arch on arch, where ogives burst a redReverberance of hail upon the deadThunder like an exploding crucible!Harshly articulate, musical steel shellOf angry worship, hurled religiouslyUpon your business of humilityInto the iron forestries of hell:Till broken in the shift of quieterDense altitudes tangential of your steel,I am become geometries, and glutExpansions like a blind astronomerDazed, while the worldless heavens bulge and reelIn the cold revery of an idiot.1927Ode to the Confederate DeadRow after row with strict impunityThe headstones yield their names to the element,The wind whirrs without recollection;In the riven troughs the splayed leavesPile up, of nature the casual sacramentTo the seasonal eternity of death;Then driven by the fierce scrutinyOf heaven to their election in the vast breath,They sough the rumour of mortality.Autumn is desolation in the plotOf a thousand acres where these memories growFrom the inexhaustible bodies that are notDead, but feed the grass row after rich row [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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