“I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with consequences,
  And the air I breathe is coloured with apocalyptic blush: 
Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic stenches,
  And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush.

“I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings,
  Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee: 
And earth’s soul yawns disembowelled of her pancreatic organs,
  Like a madrepore if mesmerized, in rapt catalepsy.

“And I sacrifice, a Levite—­and I palpitate, a poet;—­
  Can I close dead ears against the rush and resonance of things? 
Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of the heroic;
  Earth’s worst spawn, you said, and cursed me? look! approve me!  I
    have wings.

“Ah, men’s poets! men’s conventions crust you round and swathe you
    mist-like,
  And the world’s wheels grind your spirits down the dust ye overtrod: 
We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the Christlight,
  And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and our skunk smells sweet to God.

“For He grasps the pale Created by some thousand vital handles,
  Till a Godshine, bluely winnowed through the sieve of thunderstorms,
Shimmers up the non-existent round the churning feet of angels;
  And the atoms of that glory may be seraphs, being worms.

“Friends, your nature underlies us and your pulses overplay us;
  Ye, with social sores unbandaged, can ye sing right and steer wrong? 
For the transient cosmic, rooted in imperishable chaos,
  Must be kneaded into drastics as material for a song.

“Eyes once purged from homebred vapours through humanitarian passion
  See that monochrome a despot through a democratic prism;
Hands that rip the soul up, reeking from divine evisceration,
  Not with priestlike oil anoint him, but a stronger-smelling chrism.

“Pass, O poet, retransfigured!  God, the psychometric rhapsode,
  Fills with fiery rhythms the silence, stings the dark with stars
    that blink;
All eternities hang round him like an old man’s clothes collapsed,
  While he makes his mundane music—­and he will not stop, I think.”

* * * * *

THE PERSON OF THE HOUSE

IDYL CCCLXVI

THE ACCOMPANIMENTS

1.  The monthly nurse 2.  The caudle 3.  The sentences

THE KID

1.  The monthly nurse