16
Transitional Poem
Mountains are the musicians; they despiseTheir audience: but the wind is a popular preacherAnd takes more from his audience than he gives them.How can I wear the clouds, who feel each mountainYearn from its flinty marrow to abdicateSublimity and globe-trot with the wind? By Easedale Tarn, where I sought a comforter,I found a gospel sterner than repentance.Prophetic earth, you need no lumber of logicWho point your arguments alike with a primroseAnd a sick sheep coughing among the stones:And I have only words; yet must they bothOutsoar the mountain and lap up the wind.
7
Few things can more inflameThis far too combative heartThan the intellectual Quixotes of the agePrattling of abstract art.
No one would deny it—But for a blind man's passionCassandra had been no more than a draggle-skirt,Helen a ten-year fashion.Yet had there not been one hostessEver whose arms waylaid
