Villains as fat, local rascals small,

Dirty, and definite down to the smell,

And the citizen saints, he has still.

Too young for that, too old for this war,

The right age for the next is what we are.

The one thing we have to fear is fear.

Salt-white unheard sand-changing seafold.

Road ribboning through a car's wheel held

To noon, toward a sungreen mountain field.

Night in a hospital. Inheritance tax.

My son spells, while my gold watch ticks

That was my father's, and in the books

Round and round and round a yellow room

The thousand voices, one mine, seem

All almost the best one to become.

What was Shelley? Lyric political.

Coleridge a scientist, Burns erotic,

Blake, Marvell, Thompson, mystic

Or lyric religious or part Herrick.

Housman and Frost are Latinists.

Vaughan, Donne, are metaphysical

Or lyric erotic or mystical,

Eliot and Crane two classicists.

Skelton and Hardy, think, and Yeats,

Mix in heaven with Milton and John Keats.

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And I'd be there.

They sang the state,

The world, the bed, the man in the street,

And left no doubt about their doubt.

Amateur vestryman and psychiatrist,

Known scholar of some native past,

A competent hater, voter, guest,

The modern poet is jack of all trades,

Master in one, partisan of all sides

For the sake of one, strider on many roads.

So were they all jacks, a good word.

So did they each plane a new board

To nail to a house they worked toward,

Of God, Nature, Plato, on a spire

Huge in the centuries' endless air,

As the modern poet builds his here,

Poet-surgeon, engineer-poet, part

Flier, internationalist, ready in court,

A painter Sundays, but poetry the art

He studies wherever he measures men.

Man is the study where his poems begin,

His care man, as modern poetry can

Probe, chart, sing, portray or curse

What a man makes of life, a farce,

A new world, a headline, or worse.

V.1950

The laurels, the laurels all are cut,

And we'll to the woods no more, but

That was another country. It is late.

The twentieth century is at the turn

And much to fear, and much to learn.

Infinitely combustible, we'll burn

Our times to pure gold or final ash,

A lifetime's light, an instants flash.

The formula made flesh, or unmade flesh.

And what if it all went on, a dull

Long long ripening of new poets, until

Books littered the streets, and no bomb fell?

But green is green again, and full.

Leonardo's ceiling is our heaven still.

What a man wills, a man makes real.

We'll to fresh woods, and cut and bring

Home boughs, bell-branches such as rang

Ashore for Columbus coming, sung

As hymns first, vows, and then as laws.

We'll break them where they break, always,

But never a root that might be rose.

Poet: first kill your own language, rose,

Green, laurel. Unword it, and devise

Images poets after you could not use.

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Speak a great grammar as you learned it,

Wording it yours, and teach us that.

Your style is your face, an open secret.

Say copy and die, say seek new images

And live the poet all poetry owes.

Live in the justice of written praise.

And for now, ride the world's lunge

Standing up, all new and nothing strange,

Into the change that is never change.