Page:Harmonium - Wallace Stevens.djvu/49
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In moody rucks, and difficult and strangeIn all desires, his destitution's mark.He was in this as other freemen are,Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.His violence was for aggrandizementAnd not for stupor, such as music makesFor sleepers halfway waking. He perceivedThat coolness for his heat came suddenly,And only, in the fables that he scrawledWith his own quill, in its indigenous dew,Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,Green barbarism turning paradigm.Crispin foresaw a curious promenadeOr, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,And elemental potencies and pangs,And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,Making the most of savagery of palms,Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloomThat yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread.The fabulous and its intrinsic verseCame like two spirits parleying, adornedIn radiance from the Atlantic coign,For Crispin and his quill to catechize.But they came parleying of such an earth,So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiledAmong the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,Scenting the jungle in their refuges,So streaked with yellow, blue and green and redIn beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,That earth was like a jostling festivalOf seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth.
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