THE NIGHT descends in glory, and adown the purple west
The young moon, like a crescent skiff, upon some fairy quest,
Has dropped below the opal lights that linger low and far
To havens that are beaconed by the Pilot’s evening star;
And slowly, softly, from above the darkness is unfurled
A wondrous curtain loosened on the windows of the world.
Then suddenly, like magic, where smoke-stacks fumed the while,
Ten thousand lights flash out aflame along the Golden Mile.

And thro’ the dusky gauze that falls upon the looming mines

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget - I kept saying - that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division

(After Rilke)


The city floats no longer like a bait
To hook the nimble darting summer days.
The glazed and brittle palaces pulsate and radiate
And glitter. Summer's garden sways,
A heap of marionettes hanging down and dangled,
Leaves tired, torn, turned upside down and strangled:
Until from forest depths, from bony leafless trees
A will wakens: the admiral, lolling long at ease,
Has been commanded, overnight -- suddenly --:
In the first dawn, all galleys put to sea!
Waking then in autumn chill, amid the harbor medley,

For William and Emily Maxwell

At this time of day
One could hear the caulking irons sound
Against the hulls in the dockyard.
Tar smoke rose between trees
And large oily patches floated on the water,
Undulating unevenly
In the purple sunlight
Like the surfaces of Florentine bronze.

At this time of day
Sounds carried clearly
Through hot silences of fading daylight.
The weedy fields lay drowned
In odors of creosote and salt.
Richer than double-colored taffeta,
Oil floated in the harbor,
Amoeboid, iridescent, limp.

WHERE is Australia, singer, do you know?
These sordid farms and joyless factories,
Mephitic mines and lanes of pallid woe?
Those ugly towns and cities such as these
With incense sick to all unworthy power,
And all old sin in full malignant flower?
No! to her bourn her children still are faring:
She is a temple that we are to build:
For her the ages have been long preparing:
She is a prophecy to be fulfilled!

All that we love in olden lands and lore

The fat lady came out first,
tearing out roots and moistening drumskins.
The fat lady
who turns dying octopuses inside out.
The fat lady, the moon's antagonist,
was running through the streets and deserted buildings
and leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners
and stirring up the furies of the last centuries' feasts
and summoning the demon of bread through the sky's clean-swept hills
and filtering a longing for light into subterranean tunnels.
The graveyards, yes the graveyards
and the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand,

1 Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us:
consider, and behold our reproach.

2 Our inheritance is turned to strangers,
our houses to aliens.

3 We are orphans and fatherless,
our mothers are as widows.

4 We have drunken our water for money;
our wood is sold unto us.

5 Our necks are under persecution:
we labor, and have no rest.

6 We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians,
to be satisfied with bread.

7 Our fathers have sinned, and are not;
and we have borne their iniquities.

1 I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.

2 He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.

3 Surely against me is he turned;
he turneth his hand against me all the day.

4 My flesh and my skin hath he made old;
he hath broken my bones.

5 He hath builded against me,
and compassed me with gall and travail.

6 He hath set me in dark places,
as they that be dead of old.

7 He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out:
he hath made my chain heavy.

1 How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger,
and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel,
and remembered not his footstool in the day of his anger!

2 The Lord hath swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob,
and hath not pitied:
he hath thrown down in his wrath the strongholds of the daughter of Judah;
he hath brought them down to the ground:
he hath polluted the kingdom and the princes thereof.

3 He hath cut off in his fierce anger all the horn of Israel:

1 How doth the city sit solitary,
that was full of people!
How is she become as a widow!
She that was great among the nations,
and princess among the provinces,
how is she become tributary!

2 She weepeth sore in the night,
and her tears are on her cheeks:
among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her:
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her,
they are become her enemies.

3 Judah is gone into captivity
because of affliction, and because of great servitude:
she dwelleth among the heathen,