Page:Harmonium - Wallace Stevens.djvu/45

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The World without Imagination

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,The sovereign ghost. As such, the SocratesOf snails, musician of pears, principiumAnd lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wigOf things, this nincompated pedagogue,Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at seaCreated, in his day, a touch of doubt.An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,Berries of villages, a barber's eye,An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hungOn porpoises, instead of apricots,And on silentious porpoises, whose snoutsDibbled in waves that were mustachios,Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.
One eats one pate, even of salt, quotha.It was not so much the lost terrestrial,The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,That century of wind in a single puff.What counted was mythology of self,Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak

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