I

Call out, celebrate the beam

Imprisoning and expressing him.

Fix the mature flash for the end, but in advance

Fix in the glow of that sense what shall pass.

II

Give him a pale skin, a long hand,

A grey eye with deep eyelids, with deep lids.

Complete with a dark mouth the head

Of Veronese’s equerry; though of too confident a grace

His gestures, less fine than his limbs. Allow him also to sleep much,

As with an effect of wantonness. Then he should swim and run,

Jump horses and touch music, laugh willingly and grow

Among plain manners and legalities, and yet,

Say where Monongahela and Alleghany

Have woven preparatives, glistening fall, or where

New York assembles brittle towers. And let him,

Pleased to accomplish purposes,

Alight in loose dress from a car.

III

He arrives thus with the ray of his intelligence

With what may cluster about it, dispositions

Recollections and curiosity, the state

Of reason and vision, the deceits of passion,

Play of reserves, reflections, admirations

I am luminously possessed of. And all of which am anxious

To acknowledge makes him another of the many-minded, another

Exposed and assaulted, active and passive mind,

Engaged in an adventure, and interesting and interested

In itself by so being. But here solutions bristle,

For the case seems to shine out at me from the moment

I grant him all the mind I can; when I in short

Impute to him an intemperate spirit, a proud wit

And in a springing innocence that still cannot undo itself

The pallid fire I cannot if I wish, withhold. He shall

As he does, overpraise and underprize

And outvalue and contemn all those purities and powers

Of sight and speech, the so true so rich fleece

Covertly and attentively, and often too

Fastidiously and rashly to neglect.

Here the position, action on his part, his going

In a still preserved uncertainty of light

Waits only for my touch: and there I have him

Amid the impunities of the polluted city,

I see him in the stale glare of those follies,

Illiterate illuminations run to seed,

Irreconcilables and abominables

Of all kinds swallowed, neither good nor bad

Either remembered or forgotten. In the dusk

There appears the full pallor of his looks,

Desiring and desiring to desire.

And in fine he proceeds, fanned by this dubious flush

In the way I know. It comes to me afresh,

There glimmers out of it upon me that I want

Nothing to come of it at once. It glimmers,

It glimmers from the question, of how, how shall it fall

The moment of the simple sight? and where

In what green land the simple sorrow? and

Under what boughs beneath whose hand wherever,

As in a fog upon the perfumed Cape,

A falling together of many gleams

Neither remembered nor forgotten, and neither

Undesiring nor desiring, the moment of despair?

Only say it should fall, as it will fall, as it fell

Or will have fallen, hanging back but to take place

All at once in the tacit air and on the ground

Of this period: the process

Of confrontation, reflection, resolution

That follows, it is this that will ascend

To the last point of fitted and related clarity.

IV