Page:Harmonium - Wallace Stevens.djvu/53

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The green palmettoes in crepuscular iceClipped frigidly blue-black meridians,Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.
How many poems he denied himselfIn his observant progress, lesser thingsThan the relentless contact he desired;How many sea-masks he ignored; what soundsHe shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;And what descants, he sent to banishment!Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gaveThe liaison, the blissful liaison,Between himself and his environment,Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,For him, and not for him alone. It seemedIllusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,Wrong as a divagation to Peking,To him that postulated as his themeThe vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,A passionately niggling nightingale.Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,A minor meeting, facile, delicate.
Thus he conceived his voyaging to beAn up and down between two elements,A fluctuating between sun and moon,A sally into gold and crimson forms,As on this voyage, out of goblinry,And then retirement like a turning backAnd sinking down to the indulgencesThat in the moonlight have their habitude.But let these backward lapses, if they would,Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew

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