The Pure Good of Theory
It is time that beats in the breast and it is
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
It is someone walking rapidly in the street.
The reader by the window has finished his
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.
Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker likeA shadow in mid-earth . . .
If we proposeA large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,
A form, then, protected from the battering,
Mature:
A capable being may
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.
Felicity, ah!
Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.
Wallace Stevens
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