Page:Harmonium - Wallace Stevens.djvu/47
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Dejected his manner to the turbulence.The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,The dead brine melted in him like a dewOf winter, until nothing of himselfRemained, except some starker, barer selfIn a starker, barer world, in which the sunWas not the sun because it never shoneWith bland complaisance on pale parasols,Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.Against his pipping sounds a trumpet criedCelestial sneering boisterously. CrispinBecame an introspective voyager.
Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,But with a speech belched out of hoary darksNoway resembling his, a visible thing,And excepting negligible Triton, freeFrom the unavoidable shadow of himselfThat lay elsewhere around him. SeveranceWas clear. The last distortion of romanceForsook the insatiable egotist. The seaSevers not only lands but also selves.Here was no help before reality.Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.The imagination, here, could not evade,In poems of plums, the strict austerityOf one vast, subjugating, final tone.The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?Out of what swift destruction did it spring?It was caparison of wind and cloudAnd something given to make whole amongThe ruses that were shattered by the large.
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