In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous
summer
5
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing mature ferocious in him.
Inspecting close maggots' might
And seething caulfron of his
being,
10
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.
The fever arose, became a flame
And Vigour circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the
sun,
15
And through my frame a sunless trembling.
My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for
knowledge
20
Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.
And so I left; and I
returned
25
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained
But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual
chains
30
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up1 in the wall of wisdom.
Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the
spot
35
There was only a little hair left,
And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a
birch.
40
It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of
Greece,
45
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa2 in her wild lament.
1936
1. Walled
2. Three types of human enterprise:
Alexander the Great, conqueror of the world; Montaigne, the ironic
commentator on all human affairs; and St. Theresa of Avila, mystic and
founder of a religious oreder.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to
Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973,
pp. 259-260.
-----
The Fury of Aerial Bombardment
You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.
You would feel that after so many
centuries
5
God would give man to repent; yet he can kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous will,
No farther advanced than in his ancient furies
Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us
all?
10
Is the eternal truth man's fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?
Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,
Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in
school
15
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.
1947
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to
Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973,
p. 261.
