Poetry - William Carlos Williams (beach read .txt) 📗

class="i2">By our boats we stay,
Then swimming away
Come to us: it is forbidden!

Come with us and play!
See, we are tall as women!
Our eyes are keen:
Our hair is bright:
Our voices speak outright:
We revel in the sea’s green!
Come play:
It is forbidden!

Immortal

Yes, there is one thing braver than all flowers;
Richer than clear gems; wider than the sky;
Immortal and unchangeable; whose powers
Transcend reason, love and sanity!

And thou, beloved, art that godly thing!
Marvellous and terrible; in glance
An injured Juno roused against Heaven’s King!
And thy name, lovely One, is Ignorance.

Mezzo Forte

Take that, damn you; and that!
And here’s a rose
To make it right again!
God knows
I’m sorry, Grace; but then,
It’s not my fault if you will be a cat.

An After Song

So art thou broken in upon me, Apollo,
Through a splendour of purple garments⁠—
Held by the yellow-haired Clymène
To clothe the white of thy shoulders⁠—
Bare from the day’s leaping of horses.
This is strange to me, here in the modern twilight.

Crude Lament

Mother of flames,
The men that went ahunting
Are asleep in the snow drifts.
You have kept the fire burning!
Crooked fingers that pull
Fuel from among the wet leaves,
Mother of flames
You have kept the fire burning!
The young wives have fallen asleep
With wet hair, weeping,
Mother of flames!
The young men raised the heavy spears
And are gone prowling in the darkness.
O mother of flames,
You who have kept the fire burning!
Lo, I am helpless!
Would God they had taken me with them!

The Ordeal

O Crimson salamander,
Because of love’s whim
sacred!
Swim
the winding flame
Predestined to disman him
And bring our fellow home to us again.

Swim in with watery fang,
Gnaw out and drown
The fire roots that circle him
Until the Hell-flower dies down
And he comes home again.

Aye, bring him home,
O crimson salamander,
That I may see he is unchanged with burning⁠—
Then have your will with him,
O crimson salamander.

The Death of Franco of Cologne: His Prophecy of Beethoven

It is useless, good woman, useless: the spark fails me.
God! yet when the might of it all assails me
It seems impossible that I cannot do it.
Yet I cannot. They were right, and they all knew it
Years ago, but I⁠—never! I have persisted
Blindly (they say) and now I am old. I have resisted
Everything, but now, now the strife’s ended.
The fire’s out; the old cloak has been mended
For the last time, the soul peers through its tatters.
Put a light by and leave me; nothing more matters
Now; I am done; I am at last well broken!
Yet, by God, I’ll still leave them a token
That they’ll swear it was no dead man writ it;
A morsel that they’ll mark well the day they bit it,
That there’ll be sand between their gross teeth to crunch yet
When goodman Gabriel blows his concluding trumpet.
Leave me!
And now, little black eyes, come you out here!
Ah, you’ve given me a lively, lasting bout, year
After year to win you round me darlings!
Precious children, little gambollers! “farlings”
They might have called you once, “nearlings”
I call you now, I, first of all the yearlings,
Upon this plain, for I it was that tore you
Out of chaos! It was I bore you!
Ah, you little children that go playing
Over the five-barred gate, and will still be straying
Spite of all that I have ever told you
Of counterpoint and cadence which does not hold you⁠—
No more than chains will for this or that strange reason,
But you’re always at some new loving treason
To be away from me, laughing, mocking,
Witlessly, perhaps, but for all that forever knocking
At this stanchion door of your poor father’s heart till⁠—oh, well
At least you’ve shown that you can grow well
However much you evade me faster, faster.
But, black eyes, some day you’ll get a master,
For he will come! He shall, he must come!
And when he finishes and the burning dust from
His wheels settles⁠—what shall men see then?
You, you, you, my own lovely children!
Aye, all of you, thus with hands together
Playing on the hill or there in a tether,
Or running free, but all mine! Aye, my very namesakes
Shall be his proper fame’s stakes.
And he shall lead you!
And he shall meed you!
And he shall build you gold palaces!
And he shall wine you from clear chalices!
For I have seen it! I have seen it
Written where the world-clouds screen it
From other eyes
Over the bronze gates of paradise!

Portent

Red cradle of the night,
In you
The dusky child
Sleeps fast till his might
Shall be piled
Sinew on sinew.

Red cradle of the night,
The dusky child
Sleeping sits upright.
Lo how
The winds blow now!
He pillows back;
The winds are again mild.

When he stretches his arms out,
Red cradle of the night,
The alarms shout
From bare tree to tree,
Wild
In afright!
Mighty shall he be,
Red cradle of the night,
The dusky child!!

Con Brio

Miserly, is the best description of that poor fool
Who holds Lancelot to have been a morose fellow,
Dolefully brooding over the events which had naturally to follow
The high time of his deed with Guinevere.
He has a sick historical sight, if I judge rightly,
To believe any such thing as that ever occurred.
But, by the god of blood, what else is it that has deterred
Us all from an out and out defiance of fear
But this same perdamnable miserliness,
Which cries about our necks how we shall have less and less
Than we have now if we spend too wantonly?

Bah, this sort of slither is below contempt!

In the same vein we should have apple trees exempt
From bearing anything but pink blossoms all the year,
Fixed permanent lest their bellies wax unseemly, and the dear
Innocent days of them be wasted quite.

How can we have less? Have we not the deed?

Lancelot thought little, spent his gold and rode to fight
Mounted, if God was willing, on a good steed.

Ad Infinitum

Still I bring flowers
Although you fling them at my feet
Until none