TWO FIGURES IN DENSE VIOLET LIGHT
I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Say that the palms are clear in a total blue,
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.
GALLANT CHATEAU
Is it bad to have come here
And to have found the bed empty?
One might have found tragic hair,
Bitter eyes, hands hostile and cold.
There might have been a light on a book
Lighting a pitiless verse or two.
There might have been the immense solitu
Of the wind upon the curtains.
Pitiless verse? A few words tuned
And tuned and tuned and tuned.
It is good. The bed is empty,
The curtains are stiff and prim and still.
THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound,
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang she uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Another denial. If she is everywhere,
She is nowhere, to him.
But this she has made. If it is
Another image, it is one she has made.
It is she that he wants, to look at directly,
Someone before him to see and to know.
ASIDES ON THE OBOE
The prologues are over. It is question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
That obsolete fiction of the wide river in
An empty land; the gods that Boucher killed;
And the metal heroes that time granulates-
The philosophers' man alone still walks in dew,
Still by the sea-side mutters milky lines.
Concerning an immaculate imagery.
If you say on the hautboy man is not enough
Can never stand as god, is ever wrong
In the end, however naked, tall, there is still
The impossible possible philosophers' man,
The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up.
He is the transparence of the place in which
He is, and in his poems we find peace.
He sets this peddler's pie and cries in summer,
The glass man, cold and numbered, dewily cries,
"Thou art not August unless I make thee so."
Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs.
Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call.
One year, death and war prevented the jasmine scent
And the jasmine islands were bloody martyrdoms.
How was it then with the central man? Did we
Find peace? We found the sum of men. We found,
If we found the central evil, the central good.
We buried the fallen without jasmine crowns.
There was nothing he did not suffer, no; nor we.
It was not as if the jasmine ever returned.
But we and the diamond globe at last were one.
We had always been partly one. It was as we came
To see him, that we were wholly one, as we heard
Him chanting for those buried in their blood,
In the forests that had been jasmine, that we knew
The glass man, without external reference.
RANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS, better known to the readers of his column as F. P. A., was born in Chicago, Illinois, November 15, 1881. He attended the University of Michigan and, after a brief career as insurance agent, plunged into journalism. In 1904 he came to New York, running his section on The Evening Mail until 1914, when he started "The Conning Tower" for the New York Tribune, transferring it some years later to the New York World and, later still, to the New York Herald Tribune. He is one of the experts on "Information Please."
Adams is the author of several volumes of a light verse that is unusually skillful. Tobogganing on Parnassus (1909), In Other Words (1912), By and Large (1914), and So There (1923) reveal a spirit which is essentially one of mockery. These contain impudent paraphrases of Horace and Propertius, and a healthy satire that runs sharply through the smooth lines. The best of his later work is in Christopher Columbus (1930) and that modern metropolitan chronicle The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys (1935), a prose portrait of himself and a period.
The rich man has his motor-car,
His country and his town estate.
He smokes a fifty-cent cigar
And jeers at Fate.
He frivols through the livelong day,
He knows not Poverty, her pinch.
His lot seems light, his heart seems gay;
He has a cinch.
Yet though my lamp burns low and dim,
Though I must slave for livelihood-
Think you that I would change with him?
You bet I would!
THOSE TWO BOYS
When Bill was a lad he was terribly bad.
He worried his parents a lot;
He'd lie and he'd swear and pull little girls' hair;
His boyhood was naught but a blot.
At play and in school he would fracture each rule-
In mischief from autumn to spring;
And the villagers knew when to manhood he grew
He would never amount to a thing.
When Jim was a child he was not very wild;
He was known as a good little boy;
He was honest and bright and the teacher's delight-
To his mother and father a joy.
All the neighbors were sure that his virtue'd endure,
That his life would be free of a spot;
They were certain that Jim had a great head on him
And that Jim would amount to a lot.
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