Classic Poem

With its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its/cathedral,
with voices — one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept — the
criterion of suitability and convenience: and Italy
with its equal shores — contriving an epicureanism
from which the grossness has been extracted:

and Greece with its goat and its gourds,
the nest of modified illusions: and France,
the " chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly, "
in whose products mystery of construction
diverts one from what was originally one's object —
substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional

shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions;

the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!
The letter a in psalm and calm when
pronounced with the sound of a in candle, is very noticeable, but

why should continents of misapprehension
have to be accounted for by the fact?
Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?
Of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite,
of heat which may appear to be haste,
no conclusions may be drawn.

To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough.
The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment,
the cataclysmic torrent of emotion
compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language,
the books of the man who is able to say,
" I envy nobody but him, and him only,
who catches more fish than I do " —
the flower and fruit of all that noted superiority —
if not stumbled upon in America,
must one imagine that it is not there?
It has never been confined to one locality.