I

He was at Naples writing letters home
And, between his letters, reading paragraphs
On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned
For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there,
While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,
Cast corners in the glass. He could describe
The terror of the sound because the sound
Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain
Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,
Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.
The volcano trembled in another ether,
As the body trembles at the end of life.

It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.
There were roses in the cool cafe. His book
Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.
Except for us, Vesuvius might consume
In solid fire the utmost earth and know
No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up
To die). This is a part of the sublime
From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,
The total past felt nothing when destroyed.

II

At the town in which acacias grew, he lay
On his balcony at night. Warblings became
Too dark, too far, too much the accents of
Afflicted sleep, too much the syllables
That would form themselves, in time, and communicate
The intelligence of his despair, express
What meditation never quite achieved.

The moon rose up as if it had escaped
His meditation. It evaded his mind.
It was part of a supremacy always
Above him. The moon was always free from him,
As night was free from him. The shadow touched
Or merely seemed to touch him as he spoke
A kind of elegy he found in space:

It is pain that is indifferent to the sky
In spite of the yellow of the acacias, the scent
Of them in the air still hanging heavily
In the hoary-hanging night. It does not regard
This freedom, this supremacy, and in
Its own hallucinations never sees
How that which rejects it saves it in the end.

III

His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell
Or what hell was, since now both heaven and hell
Are one, and here, O terra infidel.

The fault lies with an over-human God
Who by sympathy has made himself a man
And is not to be distinguished, when we cry

Because we suffer, our oldest parent, peer
Of the populace of the heart, the reddest lord,
Who has gone before us inexperience.

If only he would not pity us so much,
Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great
And small, a constant fellow of destiny,

A too, too human god, self-pity's kin
And uncourageous genesis... It seems
As if the health of the world might be enough.

It seems as if the honey of common summer
Might be enough, as if the golden combs
Were part of a sustenance itself enough

As if hell, so modified, and disappeared,
As if pain, no longer satanic mimicry,
Could be borne, as if we were sure to find our way.

IV

Livre de Toutes Sortes de Fleurs d'apres Nature
All sorts of flowers. That's the sentimentalist.
When B. sat down at piano and made
A transparence in which we heard music, made
　　music,
In which we heard transparent sounds, did he play
All sorts of notes? Or did he play only one
In ecstasy of its associates,
Variations in the tones of the single sound,
The last, or sounds so single they seem to one?

And then that Spaniard of the rose, itself
Hot-hooded and dark-blooded, rescued the rose
From nature, each time he saw it, making it,
As he saw it, exist in his own especial eye.
Can we conceive of him as rescuing less,
As muffing the mistress for several maids,
As foregoing the nakedest passion for barefoot
Philandering?... The genius of misfortune
Is not a sentimentalist. He is
That evil, that evil in the self, from which
In desperate hallow, rugged gesture, fault
Falls out on everything: the genius of
The mind, which is our being, wrong and wrong,
The genius of the body, which is our world,
Spent in the false engagements of the mind.

V

Softly lit all true sympathizers come,
Without the inventions of sorrow or the sob
Beyond invention. Within what we permit,
Within the actual, the warm, the near,
So great a unity, that it is bliss,
Ties us to those we love. For this familiar,
This brother even in the fathers eye,
This brother half-spoken in the mother's throat
And to these regalia, these things disclosed,
These nebulous brilliancies in the smallest look
Of the being's deepest darling, we forgo
Lament, willingly forfeit the ai-ai

Of parades in the obscurer selvages.
Be near me, come closer, touch my hand, phrases
Compounded of dear relation, spoken twice,
Once by the lips, once by the services
Of Central sense, these minuteiae mean more
Than clouds, benevolences, distant heads.
These are within what we permit, in-bar
Exquisite in poverty against the suns
Of ex-bar, in-bar, retaining attributes
With which we vested, once, the golden forms
And the damasked memory the golden forms,
And ex-bar's flower and fire of the festivals
Of the damasked memory the golden forms,
Before we were wholly human and knew ourselves.

VI

The sun, in clownish yellow, but not a clown,
Brings the day to perfection and then fails. He dwells.
In a consummate prime, yet still desires
A further consummation. For the lunar month
He makes the tenderest research, intent
On a transmutation which, when seen, appears
To be askew. And space is filled with his
Rejected years, A big bird pecks at him
For food. The big bird's bony appetite
Is as insatiable as the sun's. The bird
Rose from an imperfection of its own
To feed on the yellow bloom of the yellow fruit
Dropped down from the turquoise leaves. In the land-
　　　scape of
The sun, its grossest appetite becomes less gross,
Yet, when corrected, has its curious lapses,
Its glitters, it's divinations of serene
Indulgence out of all celestial sight.

The sun is the country wherever he is. The bird
In the brightest landscape downwardly revolves
Disdaining each astringent ripening
Evading the point of redness, not content
To repose in an hour or season or long era
Of the country colors crowding against it, since
The yellow grassman's mind is still immense,
Still promise is perfection's castaway.

VII

How red the rose that is the soldiers wound,
The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all
The soldiers that have fallen, red in blood,
The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.

A mountain in which no ease is ever found
Unless indifference to deeper death
Is ease, stands in the dark, a shadows' hill,
And there the soldier of time has deathless rest.

Concentric circles of shadows, motionless
Of their own part, yet moving on the winds,
Form mystical convolutions in the sleep
Of time's red soldier, deathless on his bed

The shadows of his fellows ring him round
In the high nights, the summer breathes for them
Its fragrance, a heavy somnolence, and for him,
For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep,

In which his wound is good, because life was.
No part of him was ever part of death.
A woman smoothed her forehead with her hand
And the soldier of time lies calm beneath that stroke.

VIII

The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. A capital
Negation destroyed him in his tenement
And, with him, many blue phenomena.
It was not the end he had foreseen. He knew
That his revenge created filial
Revenges. And negation was eccentric.
It had nothing of the Julian thunde-rcloud:
The assassin flash and rumble... He was denied.
Phantoms, what have you left? What underground?
What place in which to be is not enough
To be? You go, poor Phantoms, without place
Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,
As the eye closes... How cold, the vacancy
When the Phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
The tragedy, however, may have begun,
Again, in the imagination's new beginning,
In the yes of the realist spoken because he must
Say yes, spoken because under every no
Lay a passion for yes, that had never been broken.

IX

Panic in the face of the moon-- round effendi
Or the phosphored sleep in which he walks abroad
Or the majolica dish heaped up with phosphored fruit
That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,
To anyone that comes----panic, because
The moon is no longer is these nor anything
And nothing is left, but comic ugliness
Or a lustered nothingness. Effendi, he
That has lost the folly of the moon becomes
The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty.
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
This is the sky divested of its fountains.
Here in the west indifferent crickets chant
Through our indifferent crises. Yet we require.
Another chant, an incantation, as in
Another and later genesis, music.
That buffetts the shapes of its possible halcyon.
Against the haggardie... A loud large water
Bubbles up in the night and drowns to crickets
　　　　sound.
It is a declaration, a primitive ecstasy,
Truth's favors sonorously exhibited.

X

He had studied the nostalgias. In these
He sought the most grossly maternal, the creature
Who most fecundly assuaged him, the softest
One with a vague mustache and not the mauve
Maman. His anima liked its animal
And liked it unsubjugated, so that home
Was a return to birth, a being born
Again in the savagest severity,
Desiring fiercely, the child of a mother fierce
In his body, fiercer in his mind, merciless
To accomplish the truth in his intelligence
It is true that were other mothers, singular
In form, lovers of heaven and earth, she-wolves
And forest tigresses and women mixed
With the sea. These were fantastic. There were
　　homes
Like things submerged with their englutted sounds,
That were never wholly still. The softest woman,
Because she is as she was, reality,
The gross, the fecund, proved him against the touch
Of impersonal pain. Reality explained.
It was the last nostalgia: that he
Should understand. That he might suffer or that
He might die was the innocence of living, if life
Itself was innocent. To say that it was
Disentangled him from sleek ensolacings.

XI

Life is a better aspic. We are not
At the center of a diamond. At dawn,
The paratroopers fall and as they fall
They mow the lawn. A vessel sinks in waves
Of people, as big bell-billows from its bell
Bell- bellow in the village steeple. Violets,
Great tufts, spring up from buried houses
Of poor, dishonest people, for whom the steeple,
Long since, rang out farewell, farewell, farewell.

Natives of poverty, children of malheur,
The gaiety of language is our seigneur.

A man of bitter appetite despises
A well-made scene in which paratroopers
Select adieux; and he despises this:
A ship that rolls on a confected ocean,
The weather pink, the wind in motion; and this:
The steeple that tip-tops the classics sun's
Arrangements; and the violets' exhumo.

The tongue caresses these exacerbations.
They press it as epicure, distinguishing
Themselves from its essential savor,
Like hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.

XII
He disposes of the world in categories, thus:
The people there, and the unpeopled. In both, he is.
Alone. But in the people to world, there is,
Besides, the people, his knowledge of them. In
The unpeopled, there is his knowledge of himself.
Which is more desperate in the moments when it.
The will demands that what he thinks be true?

Is it himself in them that he knows or they.
In him? If it is himself in them, they have.
No secret from him. If it is they in him,
He has no secret from them. This knowledge.
Of them, and of himself destroys both worlds,
Except when he escapes from it. To be.
Alone is not to know them or himself.

This creates a third World without knowledge,
in which no one peers, in which the Will makes no.
Demands. It excepts whatever it is as true,
Including pain, which, otherwise, is false.
In the third world, then, there is no pain. Yes, but.
What lover has won in such rocks, what the woman,
However, known, at the center of heart?

XIII
It may be that one life is a punishment.
For another, as the sun's life for the fathers.
But that concerns the secondary characters.
It is a fragmentary tragedy.
Within the universal whole. The son
And the father alike, and equally are spent,
Each one, by the necessity of being.
Himself, the unalterable necessity.
Of being this unalterable animal.
This force of nature in action is the major.
Tragedy. This is destiny. Under perplexed,
The happiest enemy. And it may be.
That in his Mediterranean cloister a man,
Reclining, eased of desire, establishes.
The visible, the zone of blue and orange.
Versicolorings, establishes a time.
To watch the fire-feinting sea and calls its good,
Ultimate good, sure of a reality.
Of the longest meditation, the maximum,
The assassin is seen. Evil in evil is.
Comparative. The assassin discloses himself,
The force that destroys us is disclosed, with then.
This maximum, an adventure to be endured to.
With the politest helplessness. Ay-mi!
One feels its action moving in the blood.

XIV

Victor Serge said, "I followed his argument
With the blank uneasiness, which one might feel.
In the presence of a logical lunatic."
He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution.
Is the affair of logical lunatics.
The politics of emotion must appear.
To be an intellectual structure. The cause.
Creates a logic not to be distinguished.
From lunacy... One wants to be able to walk.
By the lake at Geneva and consider logic:
To think of the logitions in their graves.
And of the worlds of logic in their great tombs.
Lakes are more reasonable than oceans. Hence,
A promenade amid the grandeurs of the mind,
By a lake, with clouds like lights among great tombs,
Give one a blank uneasiness, as if.
One might meet Konstantinov, who would interrupt.
With his lunacy. He would not be aware of the lake.
He would be the lunatic of one idea.
In a world of ideas, who would have all the people.
Live, work, suffer and die in that idea.
In a world of ideas. He would not be aware of the.
　　　clouds,
Lighting, the martyrs of logic with white fire.
His extreme of logic would be illogical.

XV

The greatest poverty is not to live.
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire.
Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,
After death, the nonphysical people, in paradise,
Itself nonphysical, many, by chance, observe.
The green corn, gleaming and experience.
The minor of what we feel. The adventurer
In humanity has not conceived of a race.
Completely physical in a physical world.
The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals.
Lie sprawling in majors of August heat,
The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.
This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.

One might have thought of sight, but who could.
　　　think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what one sees and hears and out.
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make.
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming.
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.