A traveller who walks a temperate zone
-- Woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the foot --
Finds that its decent surface grows too thin:
Something unperceived fumbles at his nerves.
To please an ingrown taste for anarchy
Torrid images circle in the wood,
And sweat for recognition up the road,
Cramming close the air with their bookish cries.
All senses then are glad to gasp: the eye
Smeared with garish paints, tickled up with ghosts
That brandish warnings or an abstract noun;
Melodies from shards, memories from coal,
Or saws from powdered tombstones thump the ear;
Bodies rich with heat wriggle to the touch,
And verbal scents made real spellbind the nose:
Incense, frankincense; legendary the taste
Of drinks or fruits or tongues laid on the tongue.
Over all, a grand meaning fills the scene,
And sets the brain raging with prophecy,
Raging to discard real time and place,
Raging to build a better time and place
Than the ones which give prophecy its field
To work, the calm material for its rage,
And the context which makes it prophecy.
Better, of course, if images were plain,
Warnings clearly said, shapes put down quite still
Within the fingers' reach, or else nowhere;
But complexities crowd the simplest thing,
And flaw the surface that they cannot break.
Let us make at least visions that we need:
Let mine be pallid, so that it cannot
Force a single glance, form a single word;
An afternoon long-drawn and silent, with
Buildings free from all grime of history,
The people total strangers, the grass cut,
Not long, voluble swooning wilderness,
And green, not parched or soured by frantic suns

-14-