Archibald MacLeish

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:

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,

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 a...

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

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

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,

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

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

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 b...

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

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 a ...

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 im...