Against Romanticism

A traveller who walks a temperate zone

– Woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the foot –

Finds that its decent surface grows too thin:

Something unperceived fumbles at his nerves.

To please an ingrown taste for anarchy

Torrid images circle in the wood,

And sweat for recognition up the road,

Cramming close the air with their bookish cries.

All senses then are glad to gasp: the eye

Smeared with garish paints, tickled up with ghosts

That brandish warnings or an abstract noun;

Melodies from shards, memories from coal,

Or saws from powdered tombstones thump the ear;

Bodies rich with heat wriggle to the touch,

And verbal scents made real spellbind the nose;

Incense, frankincense; legendary the taste

Of drinks or fruits or tongues laid on the tongue.

Over all, a grand meaning fills the scene,

And sets the brain raging with prophecy,

Raging to discard real time and place,

Raging to build a better time and place

Than the ones which give prophecy its field

To work, the calm material for its rage,

And the context which makes it prophecy.

Better, of course, if images were plain,

Warnings clearly said, shapes put down quite still

Within the fingers’ reach, or else nowhere;

But complexities crowd the simplest thing,

And flaw the surface that they cannot break.

Let us make at least visions that we need:

Let mine be pallid, so that it cannot

Force a single glance, form a single word;

An afternoon long-drawn and silent, with

Buildings free from all grime of history,

The people total strangers, the grass cut,

Not long, voluble swooning wilderness,

And green, not parched or soured by frantic suns

Doubling the commands of a rout of gods,

Nor trampled by the drivelling unicorn;

Let the sky be clean of officious birds

Punctiliously flying on the left;

Let there be a path leading out of sight,

And at its other end a temperate zone:

Woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the foot.