AS ye came from the holy land
   Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
   By the way as you came?

How should I know your true love,
   That have met many a one
As I came from the holy land,
   That have come, that have gone?

She is neither white nor brown,
   But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath her form divine
   In the earth or the air.

Such a one did I meet, good sir,

To give life you must take life,
and as our grief falls flat and hollow
upon the billion-blooded sea
I pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmed
with white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatures
lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.
Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow
did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be
young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.
I hated you when it would have taken less courage
to love.

Portate bien,
behave yourself you always said to me.
I behaved myself
when others were warm in winter
and I stood out in the cold.
I behaved myself when others had full plates
and I stared at them hungrily,
never speaking out of turn,
existing in a shell of good white behavior
with my heart a wet-feathered
bird growing but never able to crack out of the shell.
Behaving like a good boy,
my behavior shattered
by outsiders who came
to my village one day
insulting my grandpa because he couldn't speak
English
English-

496

As far from pity, as complaint—
As cool to speech—as stone—
As numb to Revelation
As if my Trade were Bone—

As far from time—as History—
As near yourself—Today—
As Children, to the Rainbow's scarf—
Or Sunset's Yellow play

To eyelids in the Sepulchre—
How dumb the Dancer lies—
While Color's Revelations break—
And blaze—the Butterflies!

133

As Children bid the Guest "Good Night"
And then reluctant turn—
My flowers raise their pretty lips—
Then put their nightgowns on.

As children caper when they wake
Merry that it is Morn—
My flowers from a hundred cribs
Will peep, and prance again.

Long since I came into the school of Art,
A child in works, but not a child in heart.
Slowly I learn, by her instruction mild,
To be in works a man, in heart a child.

Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky

and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.

Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that
shines,

but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.

He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into
motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:

In the feathergrass steppe
Sources lie buried,
The thirsty sun knows
Life isn't raspberries.

In barren haymeadows
A child tarries,
Walnut crosier
Outstretched, gold-eyed,
The bracing treasure,
Slender, streams.

They bubble deep,
Both song and splashes, -
In the live coppice
An April peal.

More wondrous than God's lightning bolts,
The artesian well fills
The sham spays' dry dugs
With love's hypogean milk.

I

Yes! Beauty still rebels!
Our dreams like clouds disperse:
She dwells
In agate, marble, verse.

No false constraint be thine!
But, for right walking, choose
The fine,
The strict cothurnus, Muse.

Vainly ye seek to escape
The toil! The yielding phrase
Ye shape
Is clay, not chrysoprase.

And all in vain ye scorn
That seeming ease which ne’er
Was born
Of aught but love and care.

Take up the sculptor’s tool!
Recall the gods that die
To rule
In Parian o’er the sky.

II

Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your
    head.
Arithmet ic tell you how many you lose or win if you know how
    many you had before you lost or won.
Arithmetic is seven eleven all good children go to heaven -- or five
    six bundle of sticks.
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand
    to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and