Anno accademico 2017-18 − Letteratura Inglese − Handouts

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Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Preface

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his

impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being

charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For

these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face

in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his

own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality

of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an

unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.

From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and

vital. When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

WALTER PATER (1839-94)Conclusion [to The Renaissance]1 (1888)

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Légei pou ’Hrákleitos óti pánta Xorei kai oúdèn ménei. 2

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without –our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them –the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound– processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them –a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colour from the wall, –the movement of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest, –but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions –colour, odour, texture– in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves. Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren.3 The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, –for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass

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most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve –les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis:4 we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world,"5 in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

1 This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.

2 “Heraclitus says, ‘All things give way; nothing remains.’ ” [Plato, Cratilus, 402 A]3 “To philosophize is to cast off inertia, to vitalize.” [Novalis 1772-18014 “Men are all condemned to death with indefinite reprieves.” 5 Luke 16.8.

IMAGIST POEMS

THOMAS ERNEST HULME (1883 - 1917)

AutumA touch of cold in the Autum night —

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I walked abroad,And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedgeLike a red-faced farmer.I did not stop to speak, but nodded;And round about were the wistful starsWith white faces like town children.

Above the DockAbove the quiet dock in midnight,Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,Hangs the Moon. What seemed so far awayIs but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

The Sunset A coryphée, covetous of applause,Loth to leave the stage,With final diablerie, poises high her toe,Displays scarlet lingerie of carmin’d clouds,Amid the hostile murmurs of the stalls.

ImageOld houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.

*EZRA POUND (1885-1962)

In a Station of the MetroThe apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.

L’ArtGreen arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial LordO fan of white silk, clear as frost on the grass-blade,You also are laid aside.

AlbaAs cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valleyShe lay beside me in the dawn. RICHARD ALDINGTON (1892-1962)

PreludeHOW could I love you more? I would give up Even that beauty I have loved too well That I might love you better. Alas, how poor the gifts that lovers give— 5 I can but give you of my flesh and strength, I can but give you these few passing days

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And passionate words that, since our speech began, All lovers whisper in all ladies’ ears. I try to think of some one lovely gift 10 No lover yet in all the world has found; I think: If the cold sombre gods Were hot with love as I am Could they not endow you with a star And fix bright youth for ever in your limbs? 15 Could they not give you all things that I lack? You should have loved a god; I am but dust. Yet no god loves as loves this poor frail dust.

Images ILIKE a gondola of green scented fruits Drifting along the dank canals of Venice, You, O exquisite one, Have entered into my desolate city. IIThe blue smoke leaps Like swirling clouds of birds vanishing. So my love leaps forth toward you, Vanishes and is renewed. IIIA rose-yellow moon in a pale sky When the sunset is faint vermilion In the mist among the tree-boughs Art thou to me, my beloved. IVA young beech tree on the edge of the forest Stands still in the evening, Yet shudders through all its leaves in the light air And seems to fear the stars— So are you still and so tremble. VThe red deer are high on the mountain, They are beyond the last pine trees. And my desires have run with them. VIThe flower which the wind has shaken Is soon filled again with rain; So does my heart fill slowly with tears, O Foam-Driver, Wind-of-the-Vineyards, Until you return.

At the British Museum

I TURN the page and read: “I dream of silent verses where the rhyme Glides noiseless as an oar.” The heavy musty air, the black desks, The bent heads and the rustling noises In the great dome Vanish... And The sun hangs in the cobalt-blue sky, The boat drifts over the lake shallows, The fishes skim like umber shades through the undulating weeds,

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The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns, And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle About the cleft battlements of Can Grande’s castle....

*HILDA DOOLITTLE (1886 -1961)

Oread [early “Imagist” poem, first collected in Heliodora, 1924]Whirl up, sea—Whirl your pointed pines,Splash your great pinesOn our rocks,Hurl your green over us,Cover us with your pools of fir.

Garden [from her first collection: Sea Garden (1916)]IYou are clearO rose, cut in rock,hard as the descent of hail.

I could scrape the colour from the petalslike spilt dye from a rock.

If I could break youI could break a tree.

If I could stirI could break a tree—I could break you.

IIO Wind, rend open the heat,cut apart the heat,rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot dropthrough this thick air—fruit cannot fall into heatthat presses up and bluntsthe points of pearsand rounds the grapes.Cut the heat—plough through it,turning it on either sideof your path.

Sea Rose [first poem of Sea Garden (1916)]Rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals,meagre flower, thin,sparse of leaf,

more preciousthan a wet rose single on a stem— you are caught in the drift.

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Stunted, with small leaf, you are flung on the sand, you are lifted in the crisp sand that drives in the wind.

can the spice rose drip such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf?

from Eurydice [first numbered section] (“Eurydice”, written during H.D.’s stay at Corfe Castle during World War I, is a prime example of how she embedded herself in characters from mythology. The speaker, Eurydice, addresses Orpheus from the underworld; she is filled with anger and resentment at her lover’s failed rescue)

So you have swept me back,I who could have walked with the live souls above the earth,I who could have slept among the live flowers at last;so for your arroganceand your ruthlessnessI am swept backwhere dead lichens dripdead cinders upon moss of ash;so for your arroganceI am broken at last,I who had lived unconscious,who was almost forgot;if you had let me waitI had grown from listlessnessinto peace,if you had let me rest with the dead,I had forgot youand the past.

AMY LOWELL (1874 - 1925)

Petals (A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, 1912) Life is a streamOn which we strewPetal by petal the flower of our heart;The end lost in dream,They float past our view,We only watch their glad, early start.Freighted with hope,Crimsoned with joy,We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;Their widening scope,Their distant employ,We never shall know. And the stream as it flowsSweeps them away,Each one is goneEver beyond into infinite ways.

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We alone stayWhile years hurry on,The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

Venetian Glass (A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, 1912) As one who sails upon a wide, blue seaFar out of sight of land, his mind intentUpon the sailing of his little boat,On tightening ropes and shaping fair his course,Hears suddenly, across the restless sea,The rhythmic striking of some towered clock,And wakes from thoughtless idleness to time:Time, the slow pulse which beats eternity!So through the vacancy of busy lifeAt intervals you cross my path and bringThe deep solemnity of passing years.For you I have shed bitter tears, for youI have relinquished that for which my heartCried out in selfish longing. And to-nightHaving just left you, I can say: “'T is well.Thank God that I have known a soul so true,So nobly just, so worthy to be loved!”

Fragment (A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, 1912) What is poetry? Is it a mosaicOf coloured stones which curiously are wroughtInto a pattern? Rather glass that’s taughtBy patient labor any hue to takeAnd glowing with a sumptuous splendor, makeBeauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught,Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraughtWith storied meaning for religion’s sake.

ImagismA poetic movement of the early twentieth century that led to the style later known

as Modernism. It began in 1912 in London, when two Americans and one Englishman — Ezra

Pound, Hilda Doolittle (“H. D.”), and Richard Aldington — agreed on certain principles for writing poetry. In Pound’s view, these principles were best exemplified by some poems H. D. showed him in the British Museum Tea Room in the fall of 1912. To her astonishment, he edited them, affixed the signature of “H. D. Imagiste” to them, and then sent them off to Harriet Monroe in Chicago, to be printed in the January 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. [Since H.D. had published nothing to date, Pound shrewdly reasoned that her work would be more readily accepted if she were identified with a group of poets.]

Thus Imagism proper began with Pound and H. D., although a little earlier Pound had attached to his 1912 collection of poems Ripostes an appendix that he called “The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme,” a collection of half a dozen brief poems that were really, along with his own, the first published poems in the Imagist mode—short free verse lyrics centering on a single image—and Pound introduced them with the word, in his preferred French spelling, to indicate that the future was in their hands.

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It was not until March 1913, however, that Pound published “A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste” in Poetry, laying down what would become famous as the three rules of Imagism:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in

sequence of a metronome.

To these three guiding principles of the new poetic school, Pound added a one-sentence definition:

“An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”.

*In a Station of the MetroPound's commentary on this poem in his article "Vorticism," The Fortnightly Review 571

(Sept. 1, 1914): 465-67 (AP 4 F7 Robarts Library):

"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation ... not in speech, but in little spotches of colour. It was just that -- a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones in music. I think that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols.

"That evening, in the Rue Raynouard, I realised quite vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind of emotion, or even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes and keep at it, I might found a new school of painting, of "non-representative" painting, a painting that would speak only by arrangements in colour.

[…]"That is to say, my experience in Paris should have gone into paint ... "The “one image poem” is a form of super-position, that is to say it is one idea set

on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work 'of second intensity.' Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:Petals, on a wet, black bough.

"I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective. "This particular sort of consciousness has not been identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of attention."

*Vorticism

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Pound, shifting his allegiance from the Imagism which he had helped initiate, but which now seemed to him perhaps precious or tame, adopts the dynamic insistence of his new ally Wyndham Lewis, explaining that:

‘The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’.

*Amy Lowell’s point of view:In the preface to the anthology, “Some Imagist Poets” [1916] there is set down a

brief list of tenets to which the poets contributing to it mutually agreed […] They all found themselves in accord upon these simple rules:

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.

2. To create new rhythms –as the expression of new moods– and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry a new cadence means a new idea.

3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly of aeroplanes and automobiles, nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.

4. To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk [evade] the real difficulties of his art.

5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

(AMY LOWELL, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, New York, Macmillan, 1917).

William Wordsworth: [from] Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)

[1] The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: [that is] chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity […] The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived [...]. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation. [fickle : inconstant, capricious]

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[2] For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings.

[3] [By the foregoing quotation I have shown that] the language of Prose may yet be well adapted to Poetry; and I have previously asserted that a large portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good Prose. I will go further. I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.

[4] Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions [which are not the same, yet very similar, to the passions produced by real events].

[5] [Wordsworth tries now to explain how “words metrically arranged” may produce pleasure] The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure. Now, by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not in that state succeed each other in accustomed order. But, if the words by which this excitement is produced are in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its proper bounds. Now the co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion.

[6] I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred [similar in kind] to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

[7] Now the music of harmonious metrical language […] and the blind association of pleasure which bas been previously received from works of rhyme or metre of the same or similar construction, an indistinct perception perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life […] all these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, which is of the most important use in tempering the painful feeling, which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)Kubla Khan: Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment (1816; 1834)

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The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

Then all the charmIs broken — all that phantom-world so fairVanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,And each mis-shape the other. Stay awile,Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes—The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soonThe visions will return! And lo, he stays,And soon the fragments dim of lovely formsCome trembling back, unite, and now once moreThe pool becomes a mirror.

[From Coleridge's The Picture; or, The Lover's Resolution, lines 91-100]

Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him.

Σαμερον αδιον ασω [Αὔριον ἅδιον ἄσω, 1834*]: but the to-morrow is yet to come. [* From Theocritus, Idylls, I. 145; “I’ll sing to you a sweeter song tomorrow”]

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ran [Alpheus] Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.So twice five miles of fertile groundWith walls and towers were girdled round:And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, brooksWhere blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;And here were forests ancient as the hills, 10Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

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But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted suitable for a romanceDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! acrossA savage place! as holy and enchantedAs e'er beneath a waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,A mighty fountain momently was forced: instantlyAmid whose swift half-intermitted burst 20 broken eruptionHuge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: [separate grain from straw]And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and everIt flung up momently the sacred river.Five miles meandering with a mazy motion windingThrough wood and dale the sacred river ran, valleyThen reached the caverns measureless to man,And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from farAncestral voices prophesying war! 30 The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure sound From the fountain and the caves.It was a miracle of rare device,A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, 40 Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me,That with music loud and long,I would build that dome in air,That sunny dome! those caves of ice!And all who heard should see them there,And all should cry, Beware! Beware!His flashing eyes, his floating hair! 50 [Kubla’s hair]Weave a circle round him thrice,And close your eyes with holy dread,For he on honey-dew hath fed,And drunk the milk of Paradise.

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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the

Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798

Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur. —Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, see That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose

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Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 10 These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, patches; bunches Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves covered 'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see small woods and thickets These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, playful Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem sign Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 20 Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone. These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din loud noise Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration: —feelings too 30 Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence [= they have a big influence] On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts [that is on] Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, burden In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, 40 Is lightened: —that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, — Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— 50 [yet, no!] In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir restless agitation [of the world] Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, beams With many recognitions dim and faint, blurred and feeble And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 60 The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope,

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Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man 70 Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all. —I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, 80 That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. —That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 90 The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power harsh and unpleasant To chasten and subdue. And I have felt torment A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels 100 moves All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world [a lover of] Of eye, and ear, —both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise [they half perceive] In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 110 Of all my moral being. Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more [by all this] Suffer my genial spirits to decay: [generative, creative] For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights moving swiftly Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, 120 My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead

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From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 130 The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold the faith to believe that Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 140 Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts thy fate Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance— If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence—wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream 150 We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say you should rather say I came With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)A Defence of Poetry (1840, written 1821)

[1] Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination: and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. [connate: cognate, born at the same time]

[2] Those in whom it [this faculty of approximation to the beautiful] exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word ...

[3] Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension ...

[4] In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation ...

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[5] But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.

[6] Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters.

[7] A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.

[8] Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight.

[9] A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

[10] [Poetry] awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar ...

[11] The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.

[12] Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred.

[13] Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things.

[14] Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

[hierophant: in ancient Greece, a priest who interprets sacred mysteries or esoteric principles]

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Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

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Winter Clouded with snow The cold winds blow,And shrill on leafless boughThe robin with its burning breast Alone sings now. The rayless sun, Day's journey done,Sheds its last ebbing lightOn fields in leagues of beauty spread Unearthly white. Thick draws the dark, And spark by spark,The frost-fires kindle, and soonOver that sea of frozen foam Floats the white moon.

(1912)

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

FragmentI saw his round mouth's crimson deepen as it fell, Like a Sun, in his last deep hour;Watched the magnificent recession of farewell, Clouding, half gleam, half glower,And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek. And in his eyesThe cold stars lighting, very old and bleak, In different skies.

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William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

The Second Coming [Written 1919]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre a spiral or vortex.The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;A shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15

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Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itWind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

T.S. ELIOT (1888–1965)Ulysses, Order, and Myth (1923)

Mr. Joyce’s book has been out long enough for no more general expression of praise, or expostulation [disapproval] with its detractors, to be necessary; and it has not been out long enough for any attempt at a complete measurement of its place and significance to be possible. All that one can usefully do at this time, and it is a great deal to do, for such a book, is to elucidate any aspect of the book — and the number of aspects is indefinite —which has not yet been fixed. I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.

[…]Mr. Aldington treated Mr. Joyce as a prophet of chaos; and wailed [to cry of pain] at

the flood of Dadaism which his prescient eye saw bursting forth at the tap of the magician’s rod.

[…]I think that Mr. Aldington and I are more or less agreed as to what we want in

principle, and agreed to call it classicism. It is because of this agreement that I have chosen Mr. Aldington to attack [begin a discussion] on the present issue.

[…]It is here that Mr. Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has

the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a ‘novel’; and if you call it an epic it will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. Mr. Joyce has written one novel — the Portrait; Mr. Wyndham Lewis has written one novel Tarr. I do not suppose that either of them will ever write another ‘novel’. The novel ended with Flaubert and with James. It is, I think, because Mr. Joyce and Mr. Lewis, being ‘in advance’ of their time, felt a conscious or probably unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their novels are more formless than those of a dozen clever writers who are unaware of its obsolescence.

[…]In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity

and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires. And only those who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in

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a world which offers very little assistance to that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance.

T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920)

[1] […] One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. […]

[2] It [tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

[3] No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. […]

[4] The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe − the mind of his own country − a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind —is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. […]

[5] What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. […]

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[6] The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of "personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

[7] The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

[8] The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. […] For it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. […]

[9] […] for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. […]

[10] It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. […] Consequently, we must believe that 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences […] it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.

[11] Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. […] There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.

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T.S. ELIOT (1888–1965)

Gerontion (1920)

Thou hast nor youth nor ageBut as it were an after dinner sleepDreaming of both. HERE I am, an old man in a dry month,Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.I was neither at the hot gatesNor fought in the warm rainNor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, 5Bitten by flies, fought.My house is a decayed house,And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. 10The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. I an old man, 15A dull head among windy spaces. Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign”:The word within a word, unable to speak a word,Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger 20 In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunkAmong whispers; by Mr. SilveroWith caressing hands, at LimogesWho walked all night in the next room; 25By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark roomShifting the candles; Fraulein von KulpWho turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttlesWeave the wind. I have no ghosts, 30An old man in a draughty houseUnder a windy knob. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think nowHistory has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, 35Guides us by vanities. Think nowShe gives when our attention is distractedAnd what she gives, gives with such supple confusionsThat the giving famishes the craving. Gives too lateWhat’s not believed in, or if still believed, 40In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soonInto weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed withTill the refusal propagates a fear. ThinkNeither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

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Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues 45Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at lastWe have not reached conclusion, when IStiffen in a rented house. Think at last 50I have not made this show purposelesslyAnd it is not by any concitationOf the backward devilsI would meet you upon this honestly.I that was near your heart was removed therefrom 55To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep itSince what is kept must be adulterated?I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:How should I use it for your closer contact? 60 These with a thousand small deliberationsProtract the profit of their chilled delirium,Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,With pungent sauces, multiply varietyIn a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do, 65Suspend its operations, will the weevilDelay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirledBeyond the circuit of the shuddering BearIn fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straitsOf Belle Isle, or running on the Horn, 70White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,And an old man driven by the TradesTo a a sleepy corner. Tenants of the house,Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season. 75

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