Thursday, February 23, 2012

VOYAGES II (HART CRANE)








  


--And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,--
Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.



 
 

2 comments:

  1. For some reason 38 years have not dimmed the memory of these lines:

    "The Cross, a phantom, buckled—dropped below the dawn.
    Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn."

    Recited by Pat Calhoun, clad in overalls, earnest and playful, with all the health of youth that seemed irrepressible then.

    The Carib fire photo makes me think of London.

    Thanks.

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  2. I certainly understand why that would stick in your mind, as this (and other things do) in mine. This is very powerful, controlled (but barely) worked-up stuff. Curtis

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