Page:Harmonium - Wallace Stevens.djvu/65

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All this with many mulctings of the man,Effective colonizer sharply stoppedIn the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibsOf its eventual roundness, puerile tintsOf spiced and weathery rouges, should complexThe stopper to indulgent fatalistWas unforeseen. First Crispin smiled uponHis goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,Attentive to a coronal of thingsSecret and singular. Second, uponA second similar counterpart, a maidMost sisterly to the first, not yet awakeExcepting to the motherly footstep, butMarvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.A few years more and the vermeil capuchinGave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,The dulcet omen fit for such a house.The second sister dallying was shyTo fetch the one full-pinioned one himselfOut of her botches, hot embosomer.The third one gaping at the oriolesLettered herself demurely as becameA pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.Four daughters in a world too intricateIn the beginning, four blithe instrumentsOf differing struts, four voices several

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