Page:Harmonium - Wallace Stevens.djvu/46

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Of China, cap of Spain, imperative hawOf hum, inquisitorial botanist,And general lexicographer of muteAnd maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.What word split up in clickering syllablesAnd storming under multitudinous tonesWas name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?Crispin was washed away by magnitude.The whole of life that still remained in himDwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust.Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,The old age of a watery realist,Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanesOf blue and green? A wordy, watery ageThat whispered to the sun's compassion, madeA convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,And on the clopping foot-ways of the moonLay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with thatWhich made him Triton, nothing left of him,Except in faint, memorial gesturings,That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,Here, something in the rise and fall of windThat seemed hallucinating horn, and here,A sunken voice, both of rememberingAnd of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.The valet in the tempest was annulled.Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales,

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