Allen Tate

This is the village where the funeral Stilted its dusty march over deep ruts Up the hillside covered with queen’s lace To the patch of weeds known finally to all. Of her virtues large tongues were loud As I, a stranger, trudged the streets Gay with huckstering: loud whispers from a few Sly wags who squeezed a humor from the shroud. For this was death. I should never see these men again And yet, like the swiftness of remembered evil— An issue for conscience, say— The cold heart of death was beating in my brain: A new figuration of an old phenomenon. This is the village where women walk the streets Selling eggs, breasts ungathered, hands like rawhide; Of their virtues the symbol can be washtubs But when they die it is a time of singing, And then the symbol changes with change of place. Let the wags wag as the pall-bearers climb the hill. Let a new slab look off into the sunset: The night drops down with sullen grace.

I What is the flesh and blood compounded of But a few moments in the life of time? This prowling of the cells, litigious love, Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime. Consider the first settlers of our bone, Observe how busily they sued the dust, Estopped forever by the last dusted stone. It is a pity that two brothers must Perceive a canker of perennial flower To make them brothers in mortality: Perfect this treason to the murderous hour If you would win the hard identity Of brothers—a long race for men to run Nor quite achieved when the perfection’s won. II Near to me as perfection in the blood And more mysterious far, is this, my brother: A light vaulted into your solitude. It studied burns lest you its rage should smother. It is a flame obscure to any eyes, Most like the fire that warms the deepest grave (The cold grave is the deepest of our lies) To which our blood is the indentured slave: The fire that burns most secretly in you Does not expend you hidden and alone, The studious fire consumes not one, but two— Me also, marrowing the self-same bone. Our property in fire is death in life Flawing the rocky fundament with strife. III Then, brother, you would never think me vain Or rude, if I should mention dignity; Think little of it. Dignity’s the stain Of mortal sin that knows humility. Let me design the hour when you were born Since, if that’s vain, it’s only childlike so: Like an attempting frost on April corn Considerate death would hardly let you go. Reckon the cost—if you would validate Once more our slavery to circumstance Not by contempt of a prescriptive fate But in your bearing towards an hour of chance. It is a part so humble and so proud You’ll think but little of it in your shroud. IV The times have changed. Why do you make a fuss For privilege when there’s no law of form? Who of our kin was pusillanimous, A fine bull galloping into a storm? Why, none; unless you count it arrogance To cultivate humility in pride, To look but casually and half-askance On boots and spurs that went a devil’s ride. There was, remember, a Virginian Who took himself to be brute nature’s law, Cared little what men thought him, a tall man Who meditated calmly what he saw Until he freed his Negroes, lest he be Too strict with nature and than they less free. V Our elder brother whom we had not seen These twenty years until you brought him back From the cyclonic West, where he had been Sent by the shaking fury in the track We know so well, wound in these arteries: You, other brother, I have become strange To you, and you must study ways to seize Mortality, that knows how to derange Corpuscles for designs that it may choose; Your blood is altered by the sudden death Of one who of all persons could not use Life half so well as death. Let’s look beneath That life. Perhaps hers only is our rest— To study this, all lifetime may be best. VI The fire I praise was once perduring flame— Till it snuffs with our generation out; No matter, it’s all one, it’s but a name Not as late honeysuckle half so stout; So think upon it how the fire burns blue, Its hottest, when the flame is all but spent; Thank God the fuel is low, we’ll not renew That length of flame into our firmament; Think too the rooftree crackles and will fall On us, who saw the sacred fury’s height— Seated in her tall chair, with the black shawl From head to foot, burning with motherly light More spectral than November dusk could mix With sunset, to blaze on her pale crucifix. VII This message hastens lest we both go down Scattered, with no character, to death; Death is untutored, with an ignorant frown For precious identities of breath. But you perhaps will say confusion stood, A vulture, near the heart of all our kin: I’ve heard the echoes in a dark tangled wood Yet never saw I a face peering within. These evils being anonymities, We fulminate, in exile from the earth, Aged exclusions of blood memories— Those superstitions of explosive birth; Until there’ll be of us not anything But foolish death, who is confusion’s king. VIII Not power nor the casual hand of God Shall keep us whole in our dissevering air, It is a stink upon this pleasant sod So foul, the hovering buzzard sees it fair; I ask you will it end therefore tonight And the moth tease again the windy flame, Or spiders, eating their loves, hide in the night At last, drowsy with self-devouring shame? Call it the house of Atreus where we live— Which one of us the Greek perplexed with crime Questions the future: bring that lucid sieve To strain the appointed particles of time! Whether by Corinth or by Thebes we go The way is brief, but the fixed doom, not so. IX Captains of industry, your aimless power Awakens harsh velleities of time: Let you, brother, captaining your hour Be zealous that your numbers are all prime, Lest false division with sly mathematic Plunder the inner mansion of the blood, The Thracian, swollen with pride, besiege the Attic— Invader foraging the sacred wood: Yet the prime secret whose simplicity Your towering engine hammers to reduce, Though driven, holds that bulwark of the sea Which breached will turn unspeaking fury loose To drown out him who swears to rectify Infinity, that has nor ear nor eye.

Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog, The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness; sleep Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers, The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway. What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves. And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy To the backs of obsessions. Winter like spring no less Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets innocently The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre impudence. In such serenity of equal fates, why has Narcissus Urged the brook with questions? Merged with the element Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to tickle The cow’s gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain. Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now (The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth “Hitting on all thirty-two;” scholarship pares The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores His “passionate underwear;” morality disciplines the other Person; every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rousseau; Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated universities, three Thousand dollars a year. Simplicity, Flamineo, is obscene; Sunlight topples indignant from the hill. In every railroad station everywhere every lover Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke Thickens. Ticket in hand, he pumps his body Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip, His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or spiders Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are dead. More sanitation is enough, enough remains: dreams Do not end—lucidities beyond the stint of thought. For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain; A corpse is your bedfellow, your great-grandfather dines With you this evening on a cavalry horse. Intellect Connives with heredity, creates fate as Euclid geometry By definition: The sunlit bones in your house Are immortal in the titmouse, They trip the feet of grandma Like an afterthought each day. These unseen sunlit bones, They may be in the cat That startles them in grandma But look at this or that They meet you every way. For Pelops’ and Tantalus’ successions were at once simpler, If perplexed, and less subtle than you think. Heredity Proposes love, love exacts language, and we lack Language. When shall we speak again? When shall The sparrow dusting the gutter sing? When shall This drift with silence meet the sun? When shall I wake?

In a pyloned desert where the scorpion reigns My love and I plucked poppies breathing tales Of crimes now long asleep, whose once–red stains Dyed stabbing men, at sea with bloody sails. The golden sand drowsed. There a dog yelped loud; And in his cry rattled a hollow note Of deep uncanny knowledge of that crowd That loved and bled in winy times remote. The poppies fainted when the moon came wide; The cur lay still. Our passionate review Of red wise folly dreamed on . . . She by my side Stared at the Moon; and then I knew he knew. And then he smiled at her; to him ’twas funny— Her calm steel eyes, her earth–old throat of honey!

(1942) To Denis Devlin I Again the native hour lets down the locks Uncombed and black, but gray the bobbing beard; Ten years ago His eyes, fierce shuttlecocks, Pierced the close net of what I failed: I feared The belly-cold, the grave-clout, that betrayed Me dithering in the drift of cordial seas; Ten years are time enough to be dismayed By mummy Christ, head crammed between his knees. Suppose I take an arrogant bomber, stroke By stroke, up to the frazzled sun to hear Sun-ghostlings whisper: Yes, the capital yoke— Remove it and there’s not a ghost to fear This crucial day, whose decapitate joke Languidly winds into the inner ear. II The day’s at end and there’s nowhere to go, Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying; Get up and once again politely lying Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe With greedy eyes that stare like an old crow. How pleasantly the holly wreaths did hang And how stuffed Santa did his reindeer clang Above the golden oaken mantel, years ago! Then hang this picture for a calendar, As sheep for goat, and pray most fixedly For the cold martial progress of your star, With thoughts of commerce and society, Well-milked Chinese, Negroes who cannot sing, The Huns gelded and feeding in a ring. III Give me this day a faith not personal As follows: The American people fully armed With assurance policies, righteous and harmed, Battle the world of which they’re not at all. That lying boy of ten who stood in the hall, His hat in hand (thus by his father charmed: “You may be President”), was not alarmed Nor even left uneasy by his fall. Nobody said that he could be a plumber, Carpenter, clerk, bus-driver, bombardier; Let little boys go into violent slumber, Aegean squall and squalor where their fear Is of an enemy in remote oceans Unstalked by Christ: these are the better notions. IV Gay citizen, myself, and thoughtful friend, Your ghosts are Plato’s Christians in the cave. Unfix your necks, turn to the door; the nave Gives back the cheated and light dividend So long sequestered; now, new-rich, you’ll spend Flesh for reality inside a stone Whose light obstruction, like a gossamer bone, Dead or still living, will not break or bend. Thus light, your flesh made pale and sinister And put off like a dog that’s had his day, You will be Plato’s kept philosopher, Albino man bleached from the mortal clay, Mild-mannered, gifted in your master’s ease While the sun squats upon the waveless seas.

I’ve often wondered why she laughed On thinking why I wondered so; It seemed such waste that long white hands Should touch my hands and let them go. And once when we were parting there, Unseen of anything but trees, I touched her fingers, thoughtfully, For more than simple niceties. But for some futile things unsaid I should say all is done for us; Yet I have wondered how she smiled Beholding what was cavernous.