POEMS
Blue-blooded chin;
There was cold steel behind the horseplay. But
Even your stolid prescience sensed the time
Was ripe to take a broom
And clear this room
Our vestibule to crime:
Recall the shadows its doll-curtains rained
On Anselm Winslow's ponderous plate from blue
Canton, the breaking of the haggard tide
On the gigantic print of Waterloo,-
The
black~
and whites obscurely waterstained
With a curled scar across the glass. You cried
To see the Emperor's eagle-standard slide
From the gloved cuirassier
Staff-officer
With golden leaf cascading down his side;
And a dragoon, his plough-horse rearing, swayed
Back on his reins to crop
The buttercup
Bursting upon the braid.
VII
And now that the long smother snaps your spine
Across Poseidon's shins
To .banquet the disgusting gulls and terns
Of the debauched Atlantic, Sailor, and spins
Your green-eyed liquefaction to the sterns
Of the ships of the line
At drydock; will the sun,
Descending, harnessed, harrassed, huge,
Horse up the ocean, spun,
In the fiery deluge,
World-wide? The tide, my cousin, turns again
And the corrosive smoulder of its mould
Burns out the babble of the world's untold
K
yrie
in the cordage of your brain,
The knock and knowledge of the rainbow's fouled
And halcyon summer. You are dead and gone
Where loud-mouthed terror howled:
77
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