268
PARTISAN REVIEW
Out from the jungle of an undistinguished moment
The flexible Shadow springs.
What but the honour of a great house, what but its
Cradles and tombs may persuade the bravado of
The bachelor mind to doubt
Its dishonest path, or save from disgraceful collapse
The creature's shrinking withness bellowed at and tickled
By the huge immodest Without?
Now more than ever when torches and snare·drum
Excite the squat women of the saurian brain
Till a milling mob of fears
Break in insultingly on anywhere, when in our dreams
Pigs play on the organs and the blue sky runs shrieking
As the Crack of Doom appears,
Are the good ghosts needed with the white magic
Of their subtle loves. War has no ambiguities
Like a marriage; the result
Required of its
affaire fatale
is simple and sad,
The physical removal of all human objects
That conceal the Difficult.
Then remember me that I may remember
The test we have to learn to shudder for is not
An historical event,
That neither the low democracy of a nightmare nor
An
army's primitive tidiness may deceive me
About our predicament.
That catastrophic situation which neither
Victory nor defeat can annul; to be
Deaf yet determined to sing,
To be lame and blind yet burning for the Great Good Place,
To be essentially corrupt yet mournfully attracted
By the Real Distinguished Thing.
Let this orchard point to its stable arrangement
Of accomplished bones as a proof that our lives