1269 Arts and sciences poems

Threadsuns above the grayblack wastes. A tree- high thought grasps the light-tone: there are still songs to sing beyond mankind.

Canto III appeared in the July, 1917 issue of Poetry. Originally part of what scholars call the "Ur-Cantos," this version of Canto III was later edited by Pound to become Canto I of his collected Cantos. The section that eventually became Canto I is highlighted in blue in the poem below. —THE EDITORS III Another's a half-cracked fellow—John Heydon, Worker of miracles, dealer in levitation, In thoughts upon pure form, in alchemy, Seer of pretty visions ("servant of God and secretary of nature"); Full of plaintive charm, like Botticelli's, With half-transparent forms, lacking the vigor of gods. Thus Heydon, in a trance, at Bulverton, Had such a sight: Decked all in green, with sleeves of yellow silk Slit to the elbow, slashed with various purples. Her eyes were green as glass, her foot was leaf-like. She was adorned with choicest emeralds, And promised him the way of holy wisdom. "Pretty green bank," began the half-lost poem. Take the old way, say I met John Heydon, Sought out the place, Lay on the bank, was "plungèd deep in swevyn;" And saw the company—Layamon, Chaucer— Pass each in his appropriate robes; Conversed with each, observed the varying fashion. And then comes Heydon. "I have seen John Heydon." Let us hear John Heydon! "Omniformis Omnis intellectus est"—thus he begins, by spouting half of Psellus. (Then comes a note, my assiduous commentator: Not Psellus De Daemonibus, but Porphyry's Chances, In the thirteenth chapter, that "every intellect is omni-form.") Magnifico Lorenzo used the dodge, Says that he met Ficino In some Wordsworthian, false-pastoral manner, And that they walked along, stopped at a well-head, And heard deep platitudes about contentment From some old codger with an endless beard. "A daemon is not a particular intellect, But is a substance differed from intellect," Breaks in Ficino, "Placed in the latitude or locus of souls"— That's out of Proclus, take your pick of them. Valla, more earth and sounder rhetoric— Prefacing praise to his Pope Nicholas: "A man of parts, skilled in the subtlest sciences; A patron of the arts, of poetry; and of a fine discernment." Then comes a catalogue, his jewels of conversation. No, you've not read your Elegantiae— A dull book?—shook the church. The prefaces, cut clear and hard: "Know then the Roman speech, a sacrament," Spread for the nations, eucharist of wisdom, Bread of the liberal arts. Ha! Sir Blancatz, Sordello would have your heart to give to all the princes; Valla, the heart of Rome, Sustaining speech, set out before the people. "Nec bonus Christianus ac bonus Tullianus." Marius, Du Bellay, wept for the buildings, Baldassar Castiglione saw Raphael "Lead back the soul into its dead, waste dwelling," Corpore laniato; and Lorenzo Valla, "Broken in middle life? bent to submission?— Took a fat living from the Papacy" (That's in Villari, but Burckhardt's statement is different)— "More than the Roman city, the Roman speech" (Holds fast its part among the ever-living). "Not by the eagles only was Rome measured." "Wherever the Roman speech was, there was Rome," Wherever the speech crept, there was mastery Spoke with the law's voice while your Greek, logicians... More Greeks than one! Doughty's "divine Homeros" Came before sophistry. Justinopolitan Uncatalogued Andreas Divus, Gave him in Latin, 1538 in my edition, the rest uncertain, Caught up his cadence, word and syllable: "Down to the ships we went, set mast and sail, Black keel and beasts for bloody sacrifice, Weeping we went." I've strained my ear for -ensa, -ombra, and -ensa And cracked my wit on delicate canzoni— Here's but rough meaning: "And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, Forth on the godly sea; We set up mast and sail on the swarthy ship, Sheep bore we aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping. And winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas— Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller. Thus with stretched sail We went over sea till day's end: Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean. Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpiercèd ever With glitter of sun-rays, Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven, Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. Thither we in that ship, unladed sheep there, The ocean flowing backward, came we through to the place Aforesaid by Circe. Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin, poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, Water mixed with white flour. Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best, For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods. Sheep, to Tiresias only, Black, and a bell sheep; Dark blood flowed in the fosse. Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead Of brides, of youths, and of many passing old, Virgins tender, souls stained with recent tears, Many men mauled with bronze lance-heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms: These many crowded about me, With shouting, pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts; Slaughtered the herds—sheep slain of bronze, Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine. Unsheathed the narrow steel, I sat to keep off the impetuous, impotent dead Till I should hear Tiresias. But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth— Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other, Pitiful spirit—and I cried in hurried speech: 'Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?' And he in heavy speech: 'Ill fate and abundant wine! I slept in Circe's ingle, Going down the long ladder unguarded, I fell against the buttress, Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus. But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied! Heap up mine arms, be tomb by the sea-board, and inscribed, A man of no fortune and with a name to come; And set my oar up, that I swung 'mid fellows.' Came then another ghost, whom I beat off, Anticlea, And then Tiresias, Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me and spoke first: 'Man of ill hour, why come a second time, Leaving the sunlight, facing the sunless dead and this joyless region? Stand from the fosse, move back, leave me my bloody bever, And I will speak you true speeches.' "And I stepped back, Sheathing the yellow sword. Dark blood he drank then And spoke: 'Lustrous Odysseus, shalt Return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, Lose all companions.' Foretold me the ways and the signs. Came then Anticlea, to whom I answered: 'Fate drives me on through these deeps; I sought Tiresias.' I told her news of Troy, and thrice her shadow Faded in my embrace. Then had I news of many faded women— Tyro, Alcmena, Chloris— Heard out their tales by that dark fosse, and sailed By sirens and thence outward and away, And unto Circe buried Elpenor's corpse." Lie quiet, Divus. In Officina Wechli, Paris, M. D. three X's, Eight, with Aldus on the Frogs, And a certain Cretan's Hymni Deorum: (The thin clear Tuscan stuff Gives way before the florid mellow phrase.) Take we the Goddess, Venus: Venerandam, Aurean coronam habentem, pulchram, Cypri munimenta sortita est, maritime, Light on the foam, breathed on by zephyrs, And air-tending hours. Mirthful,orichalci, with golden Girdles and breast bands. Thou with dark eye-lids, Bearing the golden bough of Argicida.

1. THE PLAGIARIST Careless of his debts, he never credits submissions to the magazine he edits. 2. THE TAXIDERMIST Her father's dead at last, the lout— but now he's all she writes about. 3. THE ASSASSIN His verse means less to the world of letters than the bad reviews he gives his betters.

Crossed fingers gird the planet, though small optimism obtains. Will I read The Serious Doll in wraps, with its roller slur? A book where everybody, reader and writer included, dies. The kind of thing people said in the 1970s: “Hello, I’m back being me again.” My first and last names and the first and last names of both my parents have the same number of letters. The wasp waist, the tennis dress, the shirtwaist, the dirndl (Mainbocher). A distant yet achingly distinct whinny:et voila! the walking buckboard. Dustin Hoffman’s bookcase hanging by one hinge in air of Eleventh Street, dawn 1969. Telephone solicitation for a ballet school in need of “serious floors.” The thought of someone flat on his back on the carpet, tossing and giggling. If it hurts don’t do it. (There are several unless es to this caution.) For the second time in two millennia slept through the meteor shower, results of last night’s talk.

He could have stayed in the city, photographed the cheese and oyster boys after the war, opal-colored orphans or ladies of unfortunate standing, back when tall buildings still believed in America, back when concrete was still a thing of splendor. Instead he went West to rehabilitate his grief. Always the white sky. Always the dark figures lost in an immense world full of danger and disaster, starvation and storms of mosquitoes thick enough to snuff out candles. Provisions lost in a blazing sun that watched constantly. Twice hit by shell fragments, once by tuberculosis. Dead at 42. The fortunate thing about his camera was its ability to stray— to put things in that didn’t belong, like footprints in the sand. Here is the photographer and his party exploring the great canyons of the West while their clothes dry on the line.

Pótuia, pótuia White grave goddess, Pity my sadness, O silence of Paros. I am not of these about thy feet, These garments and decorum; I am thy brother, Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee, And thou hearest me not. I have whispered thee in thy solitudes Of our loves in Phrygia, The far ecstasy of burning noons When the fragile pipes Ceased in the cypress shade, And the brown fingers of the shepherd Moved over slim shoulders; And only the cicada sang. I have told thee of the hills And the lisp of reeds And the sun upon thy breasts, And thou hearest me not, Pótuia, pótuia Thou hearest me not.

To love these books, and harmless tea, Has always been my foible, Yet will I ne’er forgetful be To read my Psalms and Bible. Travels I like, and history too, Or entertaining fiction; Novels and plays I’d have a few, If sense and proper diction. I love a natural harmless song, But I cannot sing like Handel; Deprived of such resource, the tongue Is sure employed — in scandal.

I wonder what the Greeks kept in these comicstrip canisters. Plums, milletseed, incense, henna, oregano. Speak to me, trove. Tell me you contained dried smoked tongue once. Or a sorcerer or a cosmetologist’s powders and unguents. And when John Keats looked at you in a collection of pots it was poetry at first sight: quotable beautiful teleological concatenations of thoughts. It’s the proverbial dog of a poem, though: slobbering panting and bright-eyed like a loquacious thug or a spokesperson embattled on behalf of a sociopolitical thesis * to which he has not had access owing to the need-to-know basis. And he never says which pot. Just an oasis of tease in a sea of tilth, kind of a concrete catachresis bopping along with timbrels, irrepressible as Count Basie, fabulous I mean classic I mean vout, keeping the buckwheat in and the weevils out while the rest of us get and spend and ache and earn and go to the Bruce Springsteen concert and take our turn lining up at the Metropolitan to look at the Macedonian gold krater and promising ourselves to read up seriously.

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them and begin from your own words. As if you are the first to write poetry or the last poet. If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs, but to correct our errs in the book of agony. Don’t ask anyone: Who am I? You know who your mother is. As for your father, be your own. Truth is white, write over it with a crow’s ink. Truth is black, write over it with a mirage’s light. If you want to duel with a falcon soar with the falcon. If you fall in love with a woman, be the one, not she, who desires his end. Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health. If you ponder a rose for too long you won’t budge in a storm. You are like me, but my abyss is clear. And you have roads whose secrets never end. They descend and ascend, descend and ascend. You might call the end of youth the maturity of talent or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom, the wisdom of a cool non-lyric. One thousand birds in the hand don’t equal one bird that wears a tree. A poem in a difficult time is beautiful flowers in a cemetery. Example is not easy to attain so be yourself and other than yourself behind the borders of echo. Ardor has an expiration date with extended range. So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake, follow it before you reach your path. Don’t tell the beloved, you are I and I am you, say the opposite of that: we are two guests of an excess, fugitive cloud. Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule. Don’t place two stars in one utterance and place the marginal next to the essential to complete the rising rapture. Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions. Believe only the caravan’s trace. A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart a deadly wisdom. Be strong as a bull when you’re angry weak as an almond blossom when you love, and nothing, nothing when you serenade yourself in a closed room. The road is long like an ancient poet’s night: plains and hills, rivers and valleys. Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily follows you or the gallows. Your tasks are not what worry me about you. I worry about you from those who dance over their children’s graves, and from the hidden cameras in the singers’ navels. You won’t disappoint me, if you distance yourself from others, and from me. What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful. From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future. Don’t think, when you melt in sorrow like candle tears, of who will see you or follow your intuition’s light. Think of yourself: is this all of myself? The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole. No advice in love. It’s experience. No advice in poetry. It’s talent. And last but not least, Salaam.

Achilles Holt, Stanford, 1930 Here for a few short years Strengthen affections; meet, Later, the dull arrears Of age, and be discreet. The angry blood burns low. Some friend of lesser mind Discerns you not; but so Your solitude’s defined. Write little; do it well. Your knowledge will be such, At last, as to dispel What moves you overmuch.