Elegy
Too proud to die; broken and blind he
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow
On that darkest day,
Too proud to die; broken and blind he
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow
On that darkest day,
'If my head hurt a hair's
Pack back the downed bone
If the unpricked ball of my
Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out
My tears are like the quiet
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the
Of unremembered skies and snows
Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
Now as I was young and easy under the apple
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and
When I was a windy boy and a
And the black spit of the chapel fold,(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
I have longed to move
From the hissing of the spent
And the old terrors' continual
Growing more terrible as the
From love's first fever to her plague, from the soft
And to the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron
Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house The gentleman lay graveward with his furies; Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam, And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies, The atlas-eater with a jaw for news, Bit out the mandrake with to-mor...
Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the
That shaped the Jordan near my
Ears in the turrets
Hands grumble on the door,
Eyes in the gables
The fingers at the locks