Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the
And here upon earth's noonward
To feel the always coming
The always rising of the night:

The incoherent rushing of the train Dulls like a drugged pain Numbs To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums Unfolds Hush within hush until the night withholds Only its darkness.
From the deep Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep Slowly…

We too, we too, descending once
The hills of our own land, we too have
Far off —- Ah, que ce cor a longue haleine —-The horn of Roland in the passages of Spain,
The first, the second blast, the failing third,

Señora, it is true the Greeks are dead.
It is true also that we here are Americans:
That we use the machines: that a sight of the god is unusual:
That more people have more thoughts: that there are Progress and science and tractors…

There was a lad and he sat alone,
And he watched the sky where a bird had flown,
And he watched the sea where a wind had run,
And he watched his shadow in the sun.And he said, I know that birds go by…

mon semblable, mon frère(1) Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction In that perspective of the action Which pictures us inhabiting the end Of everything with death for only friend.
Not that we love death,
Not truly, not the fluttering…

Oh, not the loss of the accomplished thing!
Not dumb farewells, nor long relinquishment Of beauty had, and golden summer spent,
And savage glory of the fluttering Torn banners of the rain, and frosty ring Of moon-white winters, and the…

for Ernest
AP we these coppered
With headed
And garlic longed-for by the eager

The young dead soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.
They say:

The earth, still heavy and warm with afternoon,
Dazed by the moon:
The earth, tormented with the moon’s light,
Wandering in the night:

These alternate nights and days, these seasons Somehow fail to convince me.
It seems I have the sense of infinity! (In your dreams,
O crew of Columbus,
O listeners over the sea For the surf that breaks upon Nothing—) Once I was…

HE praisers of women in their proud and beautiful
Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the
Boasted those they loved should be forever
These were

There stands a tower on a hill
Between the seven seas,
But how it's called I cannot tell
Nor where it is.There lives therein a lady there…

Think of our blindness where the water burned!
Are we so certain that those wings, returned And turning, we had half discerned Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen The bird aloft there, did not mean?— Our hearts so seized upon the…

for Learned and Augustus
You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you,
Stand with me a little by the walls Or where the walls once were.
The bridge was here, the city further:

This poem is for my wife.
I have made it plainly and honestly:
The mark is on
Like the burl on the knife.

Quite unexpectedly, as
The armless ambidextrian was lightingA match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in
The neck of Madame Sossman while the

To R.
L.
ER her voice, her name,
Eyes, quietness neither

When liberty is headlong girl And runs her roads and wends her ways Liberty will shriek and whirl Her showery torch to see it blaze.
When liberty is wedded wife And keeps the barn and counts the byre Liberty amends her life.
She drowns…

Will it last? he says.
Is it a masterpiece?
Will generation after
Turn with reverence to the page?

No more on slant wings of the fisher gull,
Flashing like blades across the blowing light,
Do I coast up the morning in slow flight
Peering for some rare silver in the sea;…

Standing between the sun and moon preservesA certain secrecy.
Or seems to
Something inviolate if only
His father was an ape.

WE
VE loved each other in this time twenty
And with such love as few men have in them even
One or for the marriage month or the hearing

First there is the wind but not like the familiar wind but long and without lapses or falling away or surges of air as is usual but rather like the persistent pressure of a river or a running tide. This wind is from the other side and has an odor…