582
PARTISAN REVIEW
that creeps upon that mountain. Do not weep!
Let needle points, let glaciers creep!
but make your thought as wide as the clock's face,
keeping your selfhood and your soul apart,
seeing the circular journey without end,
hearing the drumbeat of the steady pace,
knowing that birth is death's
as morn is midnight's friend.
Perfection
sees the far end, and never
with striving intervenes.
The change from prophecy to recollection
is all that action means.
Conrad Aiken
THE RETURN
Dear tiger lily, fanged and striped! you are the bravest,
you as well as another will serve to chant
tongued with flame our vernal madrigal,
sowing among sequins of last year's locust
love's golden rhetoric:
you and the celandine
of immaculate green.
Wraiths of snow run from the stallion sun,
quicksilver lizards of water
flick their tails into cisterns,
and on the tarnished grass
where north wind sheered his drifts
in phantom edifice
melts the last sickle of pale ice:
and there, in a little while, where late was snow,
the Indian Pipes will blow.
o
darling, listen- from the orchised bog
chuckles the ancient and omniscient frog
his gross venereal hymn:
and the reed-scented wind, the bulrush-rattling wind,
