Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
CHOCORUA TO ITS NEIGHBOR I To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak And to be heard is to be large in space, That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is To perceive men without reference to their form. II The armies are forms in number, as cities are. The armies are cities in movement. But a war Between cities is a gesticulation of forms, A Swarming of number over number, not One foot approaching, one uplifted arm. III At the end of night last night a crystal star, The crystal-pointed star of morning, rose And lit the snow to a light congenial To this prodigious shadow, who then came In an elemental freedom, sharp and cold. IV The feeling of him was the feel of day, And of a day as yet unseen, in which To see was to be. He was the figure in A poem for Liadoff, the self of selves: To think of him destroyed the body's form. V He was a shell of dark blue glass, or ice, Or air collected in a deep essay, Or light embodied, or almost, a flash On more than muscular shoulders, arms and chest, Blue's last transparence as it turned to black, VI The glitter of a being, which the eye Accepted yet which nothing understood, A fusion of night, its blue of the pole of blue And of the brooding mind, fixed but for a slight Illumination of movement as he breathed. VII He was as tall as a tree in the middle of The night. The substance of his body seemed Both substance and non-substance, luminous flesh Or shapely fire: fire from an underworld, Of less degree than flame and lesser shine. VIII Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark. He was not man yet he was nothing else. If in the mind, he vanished, taking there The mind's own limits, like a tragic thing Without existence, existing everywhere. IX He breathed in crystal-pointed change the whole Experience of night, as if he breathed A consciousness from solitude, inhaled A freedom out of silver-shaping size, Against the whole experience of day. X The silver-shapeless, gold-encrusted size Of daylight came while he sat thinking. He said, "The moments of enlargement overlook The enlarging of the simplest soldier's cry In what I am, as he falls. Of what I am, XI The cry is part. My solitaria Are the meditations of a central mind. I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice That is my own voice speaking in my ear. XII There lies the misery, the coldest coil That grips the centre, the actual bite, that life Itself is like a poverty in the space of life, So that the flapping of wind around me here Is something in tatters that I cannot hold.'' XIII In spite of this, the gigantic bulk of him Grew strong, as if doubt never touched his heart. Of what was this the force? From what desire And from what thinking did his radiance come? In what new spirit had his body birth? XIV He was more than an external majesty, Beyond the sleep of those that did not know, More than a spokesman of the night to say Now, time stands still. He came from out of sleep. He rose because men wanted him to be. XV They wanted him by day to be, image, But not the person, of their power, thought, But not the thinker, large in their largeness, beyond Their form, beyond their life, yet of themselves, Excluding by his largeness their defaults. XVI Last night at the end of night his starry head, Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness, part Thereof and part desire and part the sense Of what men are. The collective being knew There were others like him safely under roof : XVII The captain squalid on his pillow, the great Cardinal, saying the prayers of earliest day; The stone, the categorical effigy; And thc mother, the music, the name; the scholar, Whose green mind bulges with complicated hues: XVIII True transfigurers fetched out of the human mountain, True genii for the diminished, spheres, Gigantic embryos of populations, Blue friends in shadows, rich conspirators, Confiders and comforters and lofty kin. XIX To say more than human things with human voice, That cannot be; to say human things with more Than human voice, that, also, cannot be; To speak humanly from the height or from the depth Of human things, that is acutest speech. XX Now, I, Chocorua, speak of this shadow as A human thing. It is an eminence, But of nothing, trash of sleep that will disappear With the special things of night, little by little, In day's constellation, and yet remain, yet be, XXI Not father, but bare brother, megalfrere, Or by whatever boorish name a man Might call the common self, interior fons. And fond, the total man of glubbal glub, Political tramp with an heraldic air, XXII Cloud-casual, metaphysical metaphor, But resting on me, thinking in my snow, Physical if the eye is quick enough, So that, where he was, there is an enkindling, where He is, the air changes and grows fresh to breathe. XXIII The air changes, creates and re-creates, like strength, And to breathe is a fulfilling of desire, A clearing, a detecting, a completing, A largeness lived and not conceived, a space That is an instant nature, brilliantly. XXIV Integration for integration, the great arms Of the armies, the solid men, make big the fable. This is their captain and philosopher, He that is fortelleze, though he be Hard to perceive and harder still to touch. XXV Last night at the end of night and in the sky, The lesser night, the less than morning light, Fell on him, high and cold, searching for what Was native to him in that height, searching The pleasure of his spirit in the cold. XVI How singular he was as man, how large, If nothing more than that, for the moment, large In my presence, the companion of presences Greater than mine, of his demanding, head And, of human realizings, rugged roy . . .