Classic Poem

The yet undone, become the unwritten
By the activity of others
And the immobile pen of ourselves
Lifted, in postponed readiness,
Over the yet unsmooth paper of time—
Themes of the writing-table now,
All those implicit projects
By our minds rescued from enactment,
That lost literature which only death reads.

And we expect works of one another
Of exceeding not so much loveliness
Or fame among our physical sighs
As quietness, eventful
Not beyond thought, which moves unstrangely,
Without the historic sword-flash.

And I shall say to you, ‘There is needed now
A poem upon love, to forget the kiss by
And be more love than kiss to the lips.’
Or, failing your heart's talkativeness,
I shall write this spoken kiss myself,
Imprinting it on the mouth of time
Perhaps too finally, but slowly,
Since execution now is prudent
With the reflective sleep the tongue takes
Between thought and said.

Thus, at last, to instruct ourselves
In the nothing we are now doing,
These unnatural days of inaction,
By telling the thing in a natural tone.
We must be brave:
Daring the sedentary future
With no other hope of passion than words,
And finding what we feel in what we think,
And knowing the rebated sentiment
For the wiser age of a once foolish deed.
As to say, where I once might have risen,
Bent to kiss like a blind wind searching
For a firm mouth to discover its own,
I now sit sociably in the chair of love,
Happy to have you or someone facing
At the distance bought by the lean of my head;
And then, if I may, go to my other room
And write of a matter touching all matters
With a compact pressure of room
Crowding the world between my elbows;
Further, to bed, and soft,
To let the night conclude, my lips still open,
That a kiss has been, or other thing to dream.
The night was formerly the chronicler,
Whispering lewd rumours to the morning.
But now the story of the evening
Is the very smile of supper and after,
Is not infant to the nurse Romance,
Is the late hour at which I or you
May have written or read perhaps even this.

Sometimes, we shall declare falsely,
Young in an earlier story-sense
Impossible at the reduced hour of words.
But however we linger against exactness,
Enlarging the page by so much error
From the necessities of chance survived,
We cannot long mistake ourselves,
Being quit now of those gestures
Which made the world a tale elastic,
Of no held resemblance to our purpose.
For we have meant, and mean, but one
Consensus of experience,
Notwithstanding the difference in our names
And that we have seemed to be born
Each to a changing plot and loss
Of feeling (though our earth it is)
At home in such a timeward place.
We cannot now but match our words
With a united nod of recognition—
We had not, hitherto, heard ourselves speak
For the garrulous vigour and furore
Of the too lively loves as they clattered
Like too many letters from our hasty lips.

It is difficult to remember
That we are doing nothing,
Are to do nothing, wish to do nothing.
From a spurious cloud of disappointment
We must extract the sincere drop of relief
Corresponding to the tear in our thoughts
That we have no reason to shed.
We are happy.
These engagements of the mind,
Unproductive of the impulse to kiss,
Ring to the heart like love essential,
Safe from theatric curiosity
Which once directed our desires
To an end of gaudy shame and flourish,
So that we played these doleful parts
Abandoned between fright and pomp.

There is now little to see
And yet little to hide.
The writing of ‘I love you’
Contains the love if not entirely
At least with lovingness enough
To make the rest a shadow round us
Immaculately of shade
Not love's hallucinations substanced.
It is truer to the heart, we know now,
To say out than to secrete the bold alarm,
Flushed with timidity's surprises,
That looms between the courage to love
And the habit of groping for results.

The results came first, our language
Bears the scars of them: we cannot
Speak of love but the lines lisp
With the too memorable accent,
Endearing what, instead of love, we love-did.
First come the omens, then the thing we mean.
We did not mean the gasp or hotness;
This is no cooling, stifling back
The bannered cry love waved before us once.
That was a doubt, and a persuasion—
By the means of believing, with doubt's art,
What we were, in our stubbornness, least sure of.
There is less to tell of later
But more to say.
There are, in truth, no words left for the kiss.
We have ourselves to talk of;
And the passing characters we were—
Nervous of time on the excitable stage—
Surrender to their lasting authors
That we may study, still alive,
What love or utterance shall preserve us
From that other literature
We fast exerted to perpetuate
The mortal chatter of appearance.

Think not that I am stern
To banish now the kiss, ancient,
Or how our hands or cheeks may brush
When our thoughts have a love and a stir
Short of writable and a grace
Of not altogether verbal promptness.
To be loving is to lift the pen
And use it both, and the advance
From dumb resolve to the delight
Of finding ourselves not merely fluent
But ligatured in the embracing words
Is by the metaphor of love,
And still a cause of kiss among us,
Though kiss we do not—or so knowingly,
The taste is lost in the taste of the thought.

Let us not think, in being so protested
To the later language and condition,
That we have ceased to love.
We have ceased only to become—and are.
Few the perplexities, the intervals
Allowed us of shy hazard:
We could not if we would be rash again,
Take the dim loitering way
And stumble on till reason like a horse
Stood champing fear at the long backward turn,
And we the sorry rider, new to the mount,
Old to the fugitive manner.
But dalliance still rules our hearts
In the name of conscience. We raise our eyes
From the immediate manuscript
To find a startled present blinking the past
With sight disfigured and a brow reproachful,
Pointing the look of time toward memory
As if we had erased the relics
In order to have something to write on.
And we leave off, for the length of conscience,
Discerning in the petulant mist
The wronged face of someone we know,
Hungry to be saved from rancour of us.
And we love: we separate the features
From the fading and compose of them
A likeness to the one that did not wait
And should have waited, learned to wait.
We raise our eyes to greet ourselves
With a conviction that none is absent
Or none should be, from the domestic script of words
That reads out welcome to all who we are.

And then to words again
After—was it—a kiss or exclamation
Between face and face too sudden to record.
Our love being now a span of mind
Whose bridge not the droll body is
Striding the waters of disunion
With sulky grin and groaning valour,
We can make love miraculous
As joining thought with thought and a next,
Which is done not by crossing over
But by knowing the words for what we mean.
We forbear to move, it seeming to us now
More like ourselves to keep the written watch
And let the reach of love surround us
With the warm accusation of being poets.