Vol.14 No.3 1947 - page 250

250
PARTISAN REVIEW
And bright, or like a venerable urn,
Which, from the ash within it, fortifies
A green that is the ash of what green is,
He sees it in this tangent of himself.
And in this tangent it becomes a thing
Of weight, on which the weightless rests: from which
The ephemeras of the tangent swarm, the chance
Concourse of planetary originals,
Yet, as it seems, of human residence.
II
He must say nothing of the fruit that is
Not true, nor think it, less. He must defy
The metaphor that murders metaphor.
He seeks as image a second of the self,
Made subtle by truth's most jealous subtlety,
Like the true light of the truest sun, the true
Power in the waving of the wand of the moon,
Whose shining
is
the intelligence of our sleep.
He seeks an image certain as meaning
is
To sound, sound's substance and executant,
The particular tingle in a proclamation
That makes it say the little thing it says,
Below the prerogative jumble. The fruit so seen
As a part of the nature that he contemplates
Is fertile with more than changes of the light
On the table or in the colors of the room.
Its propagations are more erudite,
Like precious scholia jotted down in the dark.
Did not the age that bore him bear him among
Its infiltrations? There had been an age
When a pineapple on the table was enough,
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