English

" However, " said the Bachelor Carrasco,
" Some souls there be, reading your history,
Who wish the author had not numbered so
The bafflements that were your misery
And foil, most noble knight! " But Sancho, wise,
Spoke that thick candor which is half his zest:
" In these falls lies the history; all were lies
With these left out; and truth, gadzooks, is best! "
" Aye, truth to mortal eyes! " the old knight said,
" But such a truth might well have been let go.
Things that light not the living nor the dead

They told Don Quixote he was old and dazed,
Ill-born, a pauper, not a knight at all,
A thing to make the very crows amazed
With the grotesqueness of his spectacle.
I think his words of answer spoke but part
Of his defence against the worldly crew;
I think great lights were flashing in his heart
Whereof he told not, and they never knew.
I think he saw all that they saw and more —
The gaunt and tattered knight, the sorry frame;
But cared not, knowing that his bosom bore
The living embers of a vanished flame,

As Tate grows old some child will fondle him
as his mother's children fondled grandpapa.
Be resolute, for there is no solution;
as I grow old, dark slumber fades to gray.
Ulysses Grant fought for the Constitution
and chewed his old cigars while it whirled over
the piazza steps, into an ancient dump-cart
where films of dust so lightly lie upon
Constantine's Declaration of Independence.
Habeas corpus, requiescat in pace.
Booth evaded the fame he sought, by speaking
justly of Lincoln, sic semper tyrannis .

The stars and planets weary of ether wind
and weary of their own, their endless song.
Their praise of heaven thrills not as when it rolled
forth when the sky was young, ere Ezra Pound
proclaimed: Pianos are percussion instruments.
And can poets hunger for the wind no longer
as hungered spirits, gone a different way?
Shelley, who was too much like thee, O Wind.
The pard-like spirit, who said that he was pard-like.
Spirits who did not call themselves bad names
in public print, as T. S. Eliot did:

Does she who rules the sea rule the Thesaurus?
And must the tide of adolescent rage,
which floods philosophy into the mind,
recede as one grows old and words come slow?
I have an hour-glass of years in my
receding hair. Burke's hair is gray.
But we have pimples that blossom with the Spring.
The destinies of thinkers are quick words
which come between themselves and their slow thought.
Socratic knowledge of processes of knowing
is now distilled to a maxim of cold poison:
" Know thyself. " Do you prefer the ant-like

Economists, who cultivate statistics;
to prove the truth of economic destiny
by your complete obedience to its laws; —
Our youth prepares our minds to recollect
our memories of history while we live.
All dead men live now among living men.
The savage, the Nile man, Euphrates man,
the Apollonian, Dionysian Greek,
Etrurian corporation lawyer.
Mosaic Arab and Jew of the Diaspora,
the Apostolic, Patristic, Byzantine,
Nordic, Barbarian, Pagan, anchorite
and monk of the Dark Ages, who rakes embers

Wide awake, now, mind your eye,
She will think on 't by and by;
She will see — perhaps — she may,
'Gin to-morrer, not to-day.
" Be true to me,
Furgit, " says she,
Jest as it may hit her fancy:
That 's it zackly, that is Nancy.

Take a squirrel up a tree,
Jest so frisky, sir, is she:
Now on this side, now on that,
You must watch her like a cat.
It 's " No, " it's " Yes,
I rather guess, " —

Those days before we grew half-used
to breathing air suffused
with presences to tend our want;
the days when we had only thought him ...
thought him only a more imperious Rabbi,
Rabbi, who had entered
to expiate the sin of Abel;
imperious Prophet, who had quenched
the fire on the bloody Altar;
Prophet, who dared to have entered the Holy of Holies

I a.

The sun at his zenith
hangs, directly overhead to all men.
So, to each of us, face to face, directly;
Jesus stood, —
cooling his wounded feet
in the surface clay of the pasture,
watching goat-men drive their goats
from right to left, below the mound
along a road with sudden bends
to shear them in the cave where he was born. q.
While goat-men sheared their herd
in the cave past our left hand
What was his final word?
Will you comprehend?

L ASCIUAM tota possedi nocte puellam,
Cuius nequitias uincere nulla potest.
Fessus mille modis illud puerile poposci:
Ante preces totas primaque uerba dedit.
Inprobius quiddam ridensque rubensque rogaui:
Pollicitast nulla luxuriosa mora.
Sed mihi pura fuit: tibi non erit, Aeschyle, si uis
Accipere hoc munus condicione mala.