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  there lay in slowly self-consuming wrappings

  something being slowly decomposed—

  till swallowed by those unknown mouths at last,

  that never speak. (Where bides a brain that may

  yet trust the utterance of its thinking to them?)

  Then from the ancient aqueducts there passed

  eternal water into them one day—

  that mirrors now and moves and sparkles through them.

  A FEMININE DESTINY

  As when, out shooting with his friends, the king

  picks up a glass to drink from, any sort—

  and afterwards the owner of the thing

  preserves it like the rarest ever wrought:

  Fate, also thirsty, now and then maybe

  has raised a woman to its lips and drunk,

  whom then some little life has too much shrunk

  from fear of breaking and has carefully

  placed in that tremulous vitrine, wherein

  its various preciousnesses are consigned

  (or objects such as pass for precious there).

  As strange as if on loan she’s stood therein

  and simply gone on growing old and blind

  and wasn’t precious and was never rare.

  GOING BLIND

  She’d sat just like the others there at tea.

  And then I’d seemed to notice that her cup

  was being a little differently picked up.

  She’d smiled once. It had almost hurt to see.

  And when eventually they rose and talked

  and slowly, and as chance led, were dispersing

  through several rooms there, laughing and conversing,

  I noticed her. Behind the rest she walked

  subduedly, like someone who presently

  will have to sing, and with so many listening;

  on those bright eyes of hers, with pleasure glistening,

  played, as on pools, an outer radiancy.

  She followed slowly and she needed time,

  as though some long ascent were not yet by;

  and yet: as though, when she had ceased to climb,

  she would no longer merely walk, but fly.

  DEATH EXPERIENCED

  We know just nothing of this going hence

  that so excludes us. We’ve no grounds at all

  to greet with plaudits or malevolence

  the Death whom that mask-mouth of tragical

  lament disfigures so incredibly.

  The world’s still full of parts being acted by us.

  Till pleasing in them cease to occupy us,

  Death will act too, although unpleasingly.

  When, though, you went, there broke upon this scene

  a shining segment of realities

  in at the crack you disappeared through: green

  of real green, real sunshine, real trees.

  We go on acting. Uttering what exacted

  such painful learning, gesturing now and then;

  but your existence and the part you acted,

  withdrawn now from our play and from our ken,

  sometimes recur to us like intimations

  of that reality and of its laws,

  and we transcend awhile our limitations

  and act our lives unthinking of applause.

  IN THE DRAWING-ROOM

  How presently around us they all are,

  these noblemen in ruffs and courtier’s dress,

  each like an evening round his order-star

  darkening with ever more remorselessness;

  these ladies, slender, fragile, whom their clothes

  so much enlarge, with one hand in repose,

  small as the collar for a tiny hound:

  how they stand round us: round the reader, round

  the contemplator of these bibelots,

  among which there are some they still possess.

  They let us go on, in their tactfulness,

  living the kind of life we find alluring

  and they can’t grasp. They chose florescency,

  and flowers are beautiful; we choose maturing,

  and that means effort and obscurity.

  SELF-PORTRAIT FROM THE YEAR 1906

  The old, long-noble race’s unregressing

  distinction in the eye-brow’s archingness.

  The gaze with childhood’s blue and anxiousness

  still in it, far from servile, but confessing

  a server’s and a woman’s humbleness.

  The mouth made like a mouth, large, strict, and less

  apt for persuading than for just expressing

  what’s right. The forehead, not unprepossessing,

  at home in quiet down-looking shadowedness.

  This, as coherence, only just divined;

  never, as yet, in suffering or elation

  collected for some lasting culmination;

  as if from far, though, with stray things, creation

  of something real and serious were designed.

  THE COURTESAN

  The sun of Venice in my hair’s preparing

  a gold where lustrously shall culminate

  all alchemy. My brows, which emulate

  her bridges, you can contemplate

  over the silent perilousness repairing

  of eyes which some communion secretly

  unites with her canals, so that the sea

  rises and ebbs and changes in them. He

  who once has seen me falls to envying

  my dog, because, in moments of distraction,

  this hand no fieriness incinerates,

  scathless, bejewelled, there recuperates.—

  And many a hopeful youth of high extraction

  will not survive my mouth’s envenoming.

  THE STEPS OF THE ORANGERY

  Versailles

  Like kings who simply pace at certain hours

  with no more purpose than the habitude

  of showing the double-rank of courtly bowers

  their presence in their mantle’s solitude—

  even so this flight of steps ascends in lonely

  pomp between pillars bowing eternally:

  slowly and By the Grace of God and only

  to Heaven and nowhere intermediately;

  as having ordered all its retinue

  to stay behind—and they’re not even daring

  to follow at a distance; none may do

  so much as hold the heavy train it’s wearing.

  ROMAN FOUNTAIN

  Borghese

  Two basins, this one over that, ascending

  from an old marbled pool’s embosoming,

  and, from the upper, water gently bending

  to water which below stood proffering

  that gentle murmurer silence for reply there,

  and, as in hollowed hand, clandestinely

  showing it a green- and darkness-curtained sky there

  like some unrecognized reality;

  itself serenely in its lovely chalice

  unhomesickly outspreading, ring on ring,

  just sometimes dreamily downladdering,

  drop after drop, along the mossy tresses

  to the last mirror, that would gently bring

  its bowl’s convex to smile with changefulnesses.

  THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

  Jardin du Luxembourg

  With roof and shadow for a while careers

  the stud of horses, variously bright,

  all from that land that long remains in sight

  before it ultimately disappears.

  Several indeed pull carriages, with tight-

  held rein, but all have boldness in their bearing;

  with them a wicked scarlet lion’s faring

  and now and then an elephant all white.

  Just as in woods, a stag comes into view,

  save that it has a saddle and tied fast

  thereon a little maiden all in blue.

  And
on the lion a little boy is going,

  whose small hot hands hold on with all his might,

  while raging lion’s tongue and teeth are showing.

  And now and then an elephant all white.

  And on the horses the come riding past,

  girls too, bright-skirted, whom the horse-jumps here

  scarce now preoccupy: in full career

  elsewhither, hitherwards, a glance they cast—

  And now and then an elephant all white.

  And on it goes and hastens to be ended,

  and aimlessly rotates until it’s done.

  A red, a green, a gray is apprehended,

  a little profile, scarcely yet begun.—

  And now and then a smile, for us intended,

  blissfully happy, dazzlingly expended

  upon this breathless, blindly followed fun …

  SPANISH DANCER

  As in the hand a sulphur match, sheer white

  before it flames, will stretch out scintillating

  tongues on all sides, her round dance, in the tight

  ring of spectators, hasty, hot, alight,

  has started scintillatingly dilating.

  And suddenly it’s only flame that’s there.

  With one glance she has set alight her hair,

  and all at once with daring artfulness

  spins her whole dress into this fieriness,

  from which, like serpents terribly abashing,

  her naked arms stretch out aroused and gnashing.

  And then, as though her fire would not suffice,

  she gathers it all up, and in a trice

  flings it away with proud gesticulation

  and gazes: still in raging conflagration

  it’s writhing on the ground unyieldingly.—

  She, though, inflexible and with a sweet

  saluting smile, looks up victoriously

  and stamps it out with little steadfast feet.

  QUAI DU ROSAIRE

  Bruges

  The streets are moving with a gentle gait

  (like invalids the first time out of door

  trying to remember: What was here before?)

  and those that come to squares will long await

  another street, that, with a single stride,

  crosses the water evening’s clarified,

  wherein, the more things round about are waning,

  the mirrored world inhung will be attaining

  reality those things have never known.

  Did not this city vanish? Now you’re shown

  it growing (in some unfathomable way)

  alert and lucid in transposal there,

  as though that life were no such strange affair;

  there hang the gardens now with grander air,

  there behind windows suddenly aflare

  revolves the dance in the estaminets.

  Above remained?—Just silence, I opine,

  now slowly tasting, with no tasks to ply,

  berry on berry from the sweet grape-vine-

  cluster of chime that’s hanging in the sky.

  ORPHEUS. EURYDICE. HERMES.

  That was the so unfathomed mine of souls.

  And they, like silent veins of silver ore,

  were winding through its darkness. Between roots

  welled up the blood that flows on to mankind,

  like blocks of heavy porphyry in the darkness.

  Else there was nothing red.

  But here were rocks

  and ghostly forests. Bridges over voidness

  and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool

  that hung above its so far distant bed

  like a gray rainy sky above a landscape.

  And between meadows, soft and full of patience,

  appeared the pale strip of the single pathway,

  like a long line of linen laid to bleach.

  And on this single pathway they approached.

  In front the slender man in the blue mantle,

  gazing in dumb impatience straight before him.

  His steps devoured the way in mighty chunks

  they did not pause to chew; his hands were hanging,

  heavy and clenched, out of the falling folds,

  no longer conscious of the lightsome lyre,

  the lyre which had grown into his left

  like twines of rose into a branch of olive.

  It seemed as though his senses were divided:

  for, while his sight ran like a dog before him,

  turned round, came back, and stood, time and again,

  distant and waiting, at the path’s next turn,

  his hearing lagged behind him like a smell.

  It seemed to him at times as though it stretched

  back to the progress of those other two

  who should be following up this whole ascent.

  Then once more there was nothing else behind him

  but his climb’s echo and his mantle’s wind.

  He, though, assured himself they still were coming;

  said it aloud and heard it die away.

  They still were coming, only they were two

  that trod with fearful lightness. If he durst

  but once look back (if only looking back

  were not undoing of this whole enterprise

  still to be done), he could not fail to see them,

  the two light-footers, following him in silence:

  The god of faring and distant message,

  the traveling-hood over his shining eyes,

  the slender wand held out before his body,

  the wings around his ankles lightly beating,

  and in his left hand, as entrusted, her.

  She, so belov’d, that from a single lyre

  more mourning rose than from all women-mourners—

  that a whole world of mourning rose, wherein

  all things were once more present: wood and vale

  and road and hamlet, field and stream and beast—

  and that around this world of mourning turned,

  even as around the other earth, a sun

  and a whole silent heaven full of stars,

  a heaven of mourning with disfigured stars—

  she, so beloved.

  But hand in hand now with that god she walked,

  her paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings,

  uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

  Wrapt in herself, like one whose time is near,

  she thought not of the man who went before them,

  nor of the road ascending into life.

  Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness

  was filling her like fullness.

  Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness

  was she with her great death, which was so new

  that for the time she could take nothing in.

  She had attained a new virginity

  and was intangible; her sex had closed

  like a young flower at the approach pf evening,

  and her pale hands had grown so disaccustomed

  to being a wife, that even the slim god’s

  endlessly gentle contact as he led her

  disturbed her like a too great intimacy.

  Even now she was no longer that blond woman

  who’d sometimes echoed in the poet’s poems,

  no longer the broad couch’s scent and island,

  nor yonder man’s possession any longer.

  She was already loosened like long hair,

  and given far and wide like fallen rain,

  and dealt out like a manifold supply.

  She was already root.

  And when, abruptly,

  the god had halted her and, with an anguished

  outcry, outspoke the words: He has turned round!—

  she took in nothing, and said softly: Who?

  But in the distance, dark in the bright exit,

  someone or other stood, whose counte
nance

  was indistinguishable. Stood and saw

  how, on a strip of pathway between meadows,

  with sorrow in his look, the god of message

  turned silently to go behind the figure

  already going back by that same pathway,

  its paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings,

  uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

  THE BOWL OF ROSES

  You’ve seen the flare of anger, seen two boys

  bunch themselves up into a ball of something

  that was mere hate and roll upon the ground

  like a dumb animal attacked by bees;

  actors, sky-towering exaggerators,

  the crashing downfall of careering horses,

  casting away their sight, flashing their teeth

  as though the skull were peeling from the mouth.

  But now you know how such things are forgotten;

  for now before you stands the bowl of roses,

  the unforgettable, entirely filled

  with that extremity of being and bending,

  proffer beyond all power of giving, presence,

  that might be ours: that might be our extreme.

  Living in silence, endless opening out,

  space being used, but without space being taken

  from that space which the things around diminish;

  absence of outline, like untinted groundwork

  and mere Within; so much so strangely tender

  and self-illumined—to the very verge—

  where do we know of anything like this?

  And this: a feeling able to arise

  through petals being touched by other petals?

  And this: that one should open like an eyelid,

  and lying there beneath it simply eyelids,

  all of them closed, as though they had to slumber

  ten-fold to quench some inward power of vision.

  And this, above all: that through all these petals

  light has to penetrate. From thousand heavens

  they slowly filter out that drop of darkness

  within whose fiery glow the mazy bundle

  of stamens stirs itself and reaches upwards.

  And then the movement in the roses, look:

  gestures deflected through such tiny angles,

  they’d all remain invisible unless

  their rays ran streaming out into the cosmos.

  Look at that white one, blissfully unfolded

  and standing in the great big open petals