THREE ACADEMIC PIECES
Without the forfeit scholar coming in,
Without his enlargings and pale arrondissements,
Without the furious roar in his capital.
Green had, those days, its own implacable sting.
But now a habit of the truth had formed
To protect him in a privacy, in which
The scholar, captious, told him what he could
Of there, where the truth was not the respect of one,
But always of many, things. He had not to be told
Of the incredible subjects of poetry.
He was willing they should remain incredible,
Because the incredible, also, has its truth,
Its tuft of emerald that is real, for all
Its invitation to false metaphor.
The incredible gave him a purpose to believe.
III
How thick this gobbet is with overlays,
The double fruit of boisterous epicures,
Like the same orange repeating on one tree
A single self. Divest reality
Of its propriety. Admit the shaft
Of that third planet to the table and then:
1. The hut stands by itself beneath the palms.
2. Out of their bottle the green genii come.
3. A vine has climbed the other side of the wall.
4. The sea is spouting upward out of rocks.
5. Symbol of feasts and of oblivion.
6. White sky, pink sun, trees on a distant peak.
7. These lozenges are nailed-up lattices.
8. The owl sits humped. It has a hundred eyes.
9. The cocoanut and cockerel in one.
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