Harmonium (Stevens)/The Comedian as the Letter C
The Comedian As the Letter C
I
The World without Imagination
Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,The sovereign ghost. As such, the SocratesOf snails, musician of pears, principiumAnd lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wigOf things, this nincompated pedagogue,Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at seaCreated, in his day, a touch of doubt.An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,Berries of villages, a barber's eye,An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hungOn porpoises, instead of apricots,And on silentious porpoises, whose snoutsDibbled in waves that were mustachios,Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.
One eats one pate, even of salt, quotha.It was not so much the lost terrestrial,The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,That century of wind in a single puff.What counted was mythology of self,Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak Of China, cap of Spain, imperative hawOf hum, inquisitorial botanist,And general lexicographer of muteAnd maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.What word split up in clickering syllablesAnd storming under multitudinous tonesWas name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?Crispin was washed away by magnitude.The whole of life that still remained in himDwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust.Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,The old age of a watery realist,Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanesOf blue and green? A wordy, watery ageThat whispered to the sun's compassion, madeA convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,And on the clopping foot-ways of the moonLay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with thatWhich made him Triton, nothing left of him,Except in faint, memorial gesturings,That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,Here, something in the rise and fall of windThat seemed hallucinating horn, and here,A sunken voice, both of rememberingAnd of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.The valet in the tempest was annulled.Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales, Dejected his manner to the turbulence.The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,The dead brine melted in him like a dewOf winter, until nothing of himselfRemained, except some starker, barer selfIn a starker, barer world, in which the sunWas not the sun because it never shoneWith bland complaisance on pale parasols,Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.Against his pipping sounds a trumpet criedCelestial sneering boisterously. CrispinBecame an introspective voyager.
Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,But with a speech belched out of hoary darksNoway resembling his, a visible thing,And excepting negligible Triton, freeFrom the unavoidable shadow of himselfThat lay elsewhere around him. SeveranceWas clear. The last distortion of romanceForsook the insatiable egotist. The seaSevers not only lands but also selves.Here was no help before reality.Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.The imagination, here, could not evade,In poems of plums, the strict austerityOf one vast, subjugating, final tone.The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?Out of what swift destruction did it spring?It was caparison of wind and cloudAnd something given to make whole amongThe ruses that were shattered by the large.
II
Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan
In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteersOf the Caribbean amphitheatre,In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucanAnd jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,As if raspberry tanagers in palms,High up in orange air, were barbarous.But Crispin was too destitute to findIn any commonplace the sought-for aid.He was a man made vivid by the sea,A man come out of luminous traversing,Much trumpeted, made desperately clear,Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies,To whom oracular rockings gave no rest.Into a savage color he went on.
How greatly had he grown in his demesne,This auditor of insects! He that sawThe stride of vanishing autumn in a parkBy way of decorous melancholy; heThat wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,As dissertation of profound delight,Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes,Found his vicissitudes had much enlargedHis apprehension, made him intricate In moody rucks, and difficult and strangeIn all desires, his destitution's mark.He was in this as other freemen are,Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.His violence was for aggrandizementAnd not for stupor, such as music makesFor sleepers halfway waking. He perceivedThat coolness for his heat came suddenly,And only, in the fables that he scrawledWith his own quill, in its indigenous dew,Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,Green barbarism turning paradigm.Crispin foresaw a curious promenadeOr, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,And elemental potencies and pangs,And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,Making the most of savagery of palms,Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloomThat yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread.The fabulous and its intrinsic verseCame like two spirits parleying, adornedIn radiance from the Atlantic coign,For Crispin and his quill to catechize.But they came parleying of such an earth,So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiledAmong the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,Scenting the jungle in their refuges,So streaked with yellow, blue and green and redIn beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,That earth was like a jostling festivalOf seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth. So much for that. The affectionate emigrant foundA new reality in parrot-squawks.Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this oddDiscoverer walked through the harbor streetsInspecting the cabildo, the façadeOf the cathedral, making notes, he heardA rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed,Approaching like a gasconade of drums.The white cabildo darkened, the façade,As sullen as the sky, was swallowed upIn swift, successive shadows, dolefully.The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind,Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,Came bluntly thundering, more terribleThan the revenge of music on bassoons.Gesticulating lightning, mystical,Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight.An annotator has his scruples, too.He knelt in the cathedral with the rest,This connoisseur of elemental fate,Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was oneOf many proclamations of the kind,Proclaiming something harsher than he learnedFrom hearing signboards whimper in cold nightsOr seeing the midsummer artificeOf heat upon his pane. This was the spanOf force, the quintessential fact, the noteOf Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,The thing that makes him envious in phrase.
And while the torrent on the roof still dronedHe felt the Andean breath. His mind was freeAnd more than free, elate, intent, profound And studious of a self possessing him,That was not in him in the crusty townFrom which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, layThe mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,Let down gigantic quavers of its voice,For Crispin to vociferate again.
III
Approaching Carolina
The book of moonlight is not written yet Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire, Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage Through sweating changes, never could forget That wakefulness or meditating sleep, In which the sulky strophes willingly Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs. Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book For the legendary moonlight that once burned In Crispin's mind above a continent. America was always north to him, A northern west or western north, but north, And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled And lank, rising and slumping from a sea Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread In endless ledges, glittering, submerged And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon. The spring came there in clinking pannicles Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came, If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening, Before the winter's vacancy returned. The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed, Was like a glacial pink upon the air. The green palmettoes in crepuscular iceClipped frigidly blue-black meridians,Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.
How many poems he denied himselfIn his observant progress, lesser thingsThan the relentless contact he desired;How many sea-masks he ignored; what soundsHe shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;And what descants, he sent to banishment!Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gaveThe liaison, the blissful liaison,Between himself and his environment,Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,For him, and not for him alone. It seemedIllusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,Wrong as a divagation to Peking,To him that postulated as his themeThe vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,A passionately niggling nightingale.Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,A minor meeting, facile, delicate.
Thus he conceived his voyaging to beAn up and down between two elements,A fluctuating between sun and moon,A sally into gold and crimson forms,As on this voyage, out of goblinry,And then retirement like a turning backAnd sinking down to the indulgencesThat in the moonlight have their habitude.But let these backward lapses, if they would,Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew It was a flourishing tropic he required For his refreshment, an abundant zone, Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious Yet with a harmony not rarefied Nor fined for the inhibited instruments Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed Between a Carolina of old time, A little juvenile, an ancient whim, And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn From what he saw across his vessel's prow.
He came. The poetic hero without palms Or jugglery, without regalia. And as he came he saw that it was spring, A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum. The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring, Although contending featly in its veils, Irised in dew and early fragrancies, Was gemmy marionette to him that sought A sinewy nakedness. A river bore The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose, He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells Of dampened lumber, emanations blown From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes, Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks That helped him round his rude aesthetic out. He savored rankness like a sensualist. He marked the marshy ground around the dock, The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence, Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore. It purified. It made him see how much Of what he saw he never saw at all. He gripped more closely the essential prose As being, in a world so falsified, The one integrity for him, the one Discovery still possible to make, To which all poems were incident, unless That prose should wear a poem's guise at last.
IV
The Idea of a Colony
Nota: his soil is man's intelligence. That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find. Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare His cloudy drift and planned a colony. Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Rex and principium, exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse: A still new continent in which to dwell. What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind, If not, when all is said, to drive away The shadow of his fellows from the skies, And, from their stale intelligence released, To make a new intelligence prevail? Hence the reverberations in the words Of his first central hymns, the celebrants Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength Of his aesthetic, his philosophy, The more invidious, the more desired. The florist asking aid from cabbages, The rich man going bare, the paladin Afraid, the blind man as astronomer, The appointed power unwielded from disdain. His western voyage ended and began. The torment of fastidious thought grew slack, Another, still more bellicose, came on. He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena, And, being full of the caprice, inscribed Commingled souvenirs and prophecies. He made a singular collation. Thus: The natives of the rain are rainy men. Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes, And April hillsides wooded white and pink, Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. And in their music showering sounds intone. On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote, What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore, What pulpy dram distilled of innocence, That streaking gold should speak in him Or bask within his images and words? If these rude instances impeach themselves By force of rudeness, let the principle Be plain. For application Crispin strove, Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.
Upon these premises propounding, he Projected a colony that should extend To the dusk of a whistling south below the south, A comprehensive island hemisphere. The man in Georgia waking among pines Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man, Planting his pristine cores in Florida, Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery, But on the banjo's categorical gut, Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays.Sepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal,Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,Should make the intricate Sierra scan.And dark Brazilians in their cafés,Musing immaculate, pampean dits,Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,To be their latest, lucent paramour.These are the broadest instances. Crispin,Progenitor of such extensive scope,Was not indifferent to smart detail.The melon should have apposite ritual,Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,When its black branches came to bud, belle day,Should have an incantation. And again,When piled on salvers its aroma steepedThe summer, it should have a sacramentAnd celebration. Shrewd novitiatesShould be the clerks of our experience.
These bland excursions into time to come,Related in romance to backward flights,However prodigal, however proud,Contained in their afflatus the reproachThat first drove Crispin to his wandering.He could not be content with counterfeit,With masquerade of thought, with hapless wordsThat must belie the racking masquerade,With fictive flourishes that preordainedHis passion's permit, hang of coat, degreeOf buttons, measure of his salt. Such trashMight help the blind, not him, serenely sly.It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was, Preferring text to gloss, he humbly servedGrotesque apprenticeship to chance event,A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.There is a monotonous babbling in our dreamsThat makes them our dependent heirs, the heirsOf dreamers buried in our sleep, and notThe oncoming fantasies of better birth.The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamedTheir dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.
Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?No, no: veracious page on page, exact.
V
A Nice Shady Home
Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontentHad kept him still the pricking realist,Choosing his element from droll confectOf was and is and shall or ought to be,Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, farBeyond carked Yucatan, he might have comeTo colonize his polar planterdomAnd jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.But his emprize to that idea soon sped.Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling thereSlid from his continent by slow recessTo things within his actual eye, alertTo the difficulty of rebellious thoughtWhen the sky is blue. The blue infected will.It may be that the yarrow in his fieldsSealed pensive purple under its concern.But day by day, now this thing and now thatConfined him, while it cosseted, condoned,Little by little, as if the suzerain soilAbashed him by carouse to humble yetAttach. It seemed haphazard denouement.He first, as realist, admitted thatWhoever hunts a matinal continent May, after all, stop short before a plumAnd be content and still be realist.The words of things entangle and confuse.The plum survives its poems. It may hangIn the sunshine placidly, colored by groundObliquities of those who pass beneath,Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauvedIn bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.So Crispin hasped on the surviving form,For him, of shall or ought to be in is.
Was he to bray this in profoundest brassArointing his dreams with fugal requiems?Was he to company vastest things defunctWith a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?Scrawl a tragedian's testament? ProlongHis active force in an inactive dirge,Which, let the tall musicians call and call,Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amenThrough choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?Because he built a cabin who once plannedLoquacious columns by the ructive sea?Because he turned to salad-beds again?Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?Should he lay by the personal and makeOf his own fate an instance of all fate?What is one man among so many men?What are so many men in such a world?Can one man think one thing and think it long?Can one man be one thing and be it long?The very man despising honest quiltsLies quilted to his poll in his despite.For realists, what is is what should be. And so it came, his cabin shuffled up,His trees were planted, his duenna broughtHer prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,The curtains flittered and the door was closed.Crispin, magister of a single room,Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell downIt was as if the solitude concealedAnd covered him and his congenial sleep.So deep a sound fell down it grew to beA long soothsaying silence down and down.The crickets beat their tambours in the wind,Marching a motionless march, custodians.
In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,Each day, still curious, but in a roundLess prickly and much more condign than thatHe once thought necessary. Like Candide,Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,And cream for the fig and silver for the cream,A blonde to tip the silver and to tasteThe rapey gouts. Good star, how that to beAnnealed them in their cabin ribaldries!Yet the quotidian saps philosophersAnd men like Crispin like them in intent,If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.But the quotidian composed as his,Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,Although the rose was not the noble thornOf crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flungUpon the rumpling bottomness, and nightsIn which those frail custodians watched,Indifferent to the tepid summer cold, While he poured out upon the lips of herThat lay beside him, the quotidianLike this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.For all it takes it gives a humped returnExchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.
VI
And Daughters with Curls
Portentous enunciation, syllableTo blessed syllable affined, and soundBubbling felicity in cantilene,Prolific and tormenting tendernessOf music, as it comes to unison,Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's lastDeduction. Thrum with a proud douceurHis grand pronunciamento and devise.
The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.The return to social nature, once begun,Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,Involved him in midwifery so denseHis cabin counted as philactary,Then place of vexing palankeens, then hauntOf children nibbling at the sugared void,Infants yet eminently old, then domeAnd halidom for the unbraided femes,Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,True daughters both of Crispin and his clay. All this with many mulctings of the man,Effective colonizer sharply stoppedIn the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibsOf its eventual roundness, puerile tintsOf spiced and weathery rouges, should complexThe stopper to indulgent fatalistWas unforeseen. First Crispin smiled uponHis goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,Attentive to a coronal of thingsSecret and singular. Second, uponA second similar counterpart, a maidMost sisterly to the first, not yet awakeExcepting to the motherly footstep, butMarvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.A few years more and the vermeil capuchinGave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,The dulcet omen fit for such a house.The second sister dallying was shyTo fetch the one full-pinioned one himselfOut of her botches, hot embosomer.The third one gaping at the oriolesLettered herself demurely as becameA pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.Four daughters in a world too intricateIn the beginning, four blithe instrumentsOf differing struts, four voices several In couch, four more personæ, intimateAs buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blueThat should be silver, four accustomed seedsHinting incredible hues, four self-same lightsThat spread chromatics in hilarious dark,Four questioners and four sure answerers.
Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed outOf its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,And sown again by the stiffest realist,Came reproduced in purple, family font,The same insoluble lump. The fatalistStepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdoteInvented for its pith, not doctrinalIn form though in design, as Crispin willed,Disguised pronunciamento, summary,Autumn's compendium, strident in itselfBut muted, mused, and perfectly revolvedIn those portentous accents, syllables,And sounds of music coming to accordUpon his law, like their inherent sphere,Seraphic proclamations of the pureDelivered with a deluging onwardness.Or if the music sticks, if the anecdoteIs false, if Crispin is a profitlessPhilosopher, beginning with green brag,Concluding fadedly, if as a manProne to distemper he abates in taste,Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,Glozing his life with after-shining flicks,Illuminating, from a fancy gorged By apparition, plain and common things,Sequestering the fluster from the year,Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,And so distorting, proving what he provesIs nothing, what can all this matter sinceThe relation comes, benignly, to its end?
So may the relation of each man be clipped.