Now Returned Home
Beyond the narrows of the Inner Hebrides We sailed the cold angry sea toward Barra, where Heaval mountain Lifts like a mast. There were few people on the steamer, it was late in the
Wise Men In Their Bad Hours
Wise men in their bad hours have envied The little people making merry like grasshoppers In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking Backward but never forward, and if they somehow Take hold upon the future
Contemplation Of The Sword
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide. The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel, formerly used to kill men, but here In the sense of a symbol. The sword:
Praise Life
This country least, but every inhabited country Is clotted with human anguish. Remember that at your feasts. And this is no new thing but from time out of mind, No transient thing, but exactly
The Day Is A Poem (September 19, 1939)
This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we hear his voice. A man of genius: that is, of amazing Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child’s soul, Heard clearly through the dog wrath, a
Cassandra
The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers Hooked in the stones of the wall, The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra, Whether the people believe Your bitter
The Broken Balance
I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch’s Life of Sulla The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways, Were all suddenly struck quiet And ran from under stone to look up
Ave Caesar
No bitterness: our ancestors did it. They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too. Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar. Or rather for we are not aquiline
The Bird With The Dark Plumes
The bird with the dark plumes in my blood, That never for one moment however I patched my truces Consented to make peace with the people, It is pitiful now to watch her pleasure
Vulture
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven, And presently it passed again,
Hurt Hawks
I The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, The wing trails like a banner in defeat, No more to use the sky forever but live with famine And pain a
Summer Holiday
When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as
Time Of Disturbance
The best is, in war or faction or ordinary vindictive life, not to take sides. Leave it for children, and the emotional rabble of the streets, to back their horse or support a brawler.
Shiva
There is a hawk that is picking the birds out of our sky, She killed the pigeons of peace and security, She has taken honesty and confidence from nations and men, She is hunting
The Maid's Thought
Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something. The west wind is dead, the waves Forget to hate the cliff, in the upland canyons Whole hillsides burst aglow With golden broom. Dear how