the evening is spread out against the sky
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
The conscience of a blackened street
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
If the street were time and he at the end of the
street
His laughter was submarine and profound
Like the old man of the sea’s
Hidden under coral islands
Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence
STAND on the
highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the
sunlight in your hair—
HERE I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy,
waiting for rain.
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with
darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
The horses,
under the axletree
Beat up the dawn from Istria
With even feet.
Where are the eagles and the
trumpets?
On
montrera mon cénotaphe
Aux côtes brûlantes de Mozambique.
And Saint Apollinaire, stiff and ascetic
Old
factory of God, is still
In its stones ècroulantes the precise form of Byzantium.
Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.
Tiens, voilà dix sous, pour la
salle-de-bains.
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone.
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there
above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete.
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
Unreal City,
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
O City City, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter
from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
Sightless, unless
The eyes
reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty
men.
Between the
idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
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The illuminations, the quest, and an absolutist poetics!
CR