Guard yourself from perceiving the inherent nastiness of man and woman.
(Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.)
Faith, as they now confess, is preposterous, an act of will. Choose the Christian sheep-cote
Or the Communist rat-fight: faith will cover your head from the man-devouring stars.
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In scornful upright loneliness they stand,
Whether of earth or sky. Their gnarled roots clingLike wasted fingers of a clutching handIn the grim rock. A silent spectral bandThey watch the old sky, but hold no communingWith aught. Only, when some lone eagle’s wingFlaps past above their grey and desolate land,Or when the wind pants up a rough-hewn glen,Bending them down as…
Staggering homeward between the stream and the trees the unhappy
Babbles a woeful song and babblesThe end of the world, the moon’s like fired Troy in a flyingcloud, the stormRises again, the stream’s in flood.The moon’s like the sack of Carthage, the Bastile’s broken, pedlarsand empiresStill deal in luxury, men sleep in prison.Old Saturn thinks it was better in his grandsire’s time but that’sfrom the…
If you should look for this place after a handful
Perhaps of my planted forest a fewMay stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coastcypress, haggardWith storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingershad the artTo make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.But if you should look in your idleness after tenthousand years:It is the granite knoll…
No vulture is here, hardly a hawk,
Under this low-lidded soft sky?On the wide heather the curlew’s whistleDies of its echo, it has no roomUnder the low lid of this tomb.But one to whom mind and imaginationSometimes used to seem burdensomeIs glad to lie down awhile in the tomb.Among stones and quietnessThe mind dissolves without a sound,The flesh drops into the ground.
No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.Or rather–for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists–Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who’ll keepPoverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.
Old garden of grayish and ochre lichen,
hereBuilt fires beside you and nestled by youOut of the ranging sea-wind? A hundred years, two hundred,You have been dissevered from humanityAnd only known the stubble squirrels and the headland rabbits,Or the long-fetlocked plowhorsesBreaking the hilltop in December, sea-gulls following,Screaming in the black furrow; no oneTouched you with love, the gray hawk and the red…