To St.
John
Once more the country
From sleep, as from his doom,
Each citizen to
His modest
Where the sky
With a Pacific boom.
Warm winds in even
Push southward angry
As we, with tank and plane,
Wrest land and
From yellow mimes,
The puny Japanese.
Boys hide in lunging
Crouching to explode,
Beyond Atlantic skies,
With cheerful
Their barking
Upon the German toad.
Marvelling day by
Upon the human
What might I have(A poet alone)To balk or
These enemies of mind?
I sought by night to
Chimeras into men-Decadence of
That, at late hour,
Untimed the
To live the past again:
Toy sword, three-cornered
At York and Lexington-While Bon-Homme whipped at
This
Whose roar went
After George made him run;
Toy rifle, leather
Above the boyish
And in that Blue
The Gray went down,
Down like a rat,
And even the rats cheered.
In a much later age(Europe had been in flames)Proud Wilson yielded
To franc and pound,
Made
In the wake of Henry James.
Where Lou Quatorze held
For sixty thousand men,
France took the German
But later, bored,
Opened the
To Hitler at Compiegne.
In this bad time no
The poet took, nor chance:
He studied Swift and Donne,
Ignored the Hun,
While with faint
Proust caused the fall of France.
Sad day at
When the Jap beetle
Our Proustian
Was Kimmel and Short,
Old women in blue,
And then the beetle bit.
It was defeat, or near
Yet all that feeble
Brave Brooks and lithe
Had sworn to
Our flagging
With literature made Prime!
Cow Creek and bright Bear Wallow,
Nursing the blague that
Spirits grown Eliotic,
Now
Are: we
The Irresponsibles!
Young men,
Americans!
You go to win the
With zeal
For our whole
You
Of liberty unfurled!
O animal excellence,
Take pterodactyl
Fire-winged into the
And find your
With cunning
On some Arabian
Or sleep your dreamless sleep(Reptilian bomber!)
The
And like a
Swear you to
Faith with imperial eye:
Take off,
O gentle youth,
And coasting
Scale crusty
Whose mythic
Resists your truth;
And spying far
Upon the Tibetan plainA limping caravan,
Dive, and
The Lama,
Survival of old pain.
Go kill the dying swan.
