poems collected

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Da neigt sich die Stunde un Rührt mich an

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come towards me, to meet and be met.

On Beauty

As the ancient stories tell us, invisible
to mortal men, beauty dwells among
the high-capped rocks near a wind gap
arduous to climb. And you must almost
wear your heart out in the struggle
required to attain its height.

On Poetry

Like the bee, she consorts with flowers
to concoct her dream
of a scented, pollen-yellow honey.

On Poetry and Painting

The word is the image of the thing.

Poetry is painting that speaks.
Painting is poetry that's silent.

translated by Sherod Santos in Greek Lyric Poetry

Theory of Beauty (Third Avenue)

Thirty-seven clocks in five tiers.

Sunset, end of a mild afternoon
the hand of winter's never quite let go of.

Mantel, cuckoo,
rusticated, ormolu, glass-domed, moving brass balls and chimes,
porcelain, French clocks with bronze figures,
thirty-seven, ranged in the shop window,
not especially attractive,

none fine, none precious,
even to my taste individually desirable,
but studying them, then turning away

to the last warmly tinted but almost heatless sunlight,
the buildings ahead in silhouette, and then
the urge to turn back to the stepped rows

and suddenly the pre-eminently important thing
is their fulfilment of the category clock,

the remarkable divergence of means
of occupying that name, honouring the terms
and intent of it but nonetheless

presenting an extraordinarily various
set of faces to the avenue, in the warm light
of the shop. Then I or you, whoever's

doing the looking, understands
that this is the city's particular signature,

the range of possibilities within any single set,
and what is pleasing is not the individual clock

(goofy or kitsch, in their frostings and columns,
scrollworks and gildings) but the distance
between it and its name,

the degree to which it belongs and at the same time
pushes towards the edges of difference

- a perception that makes the window a spectacle,
thirty-seven branching aspects of a single notion,

almost absurdly divergent
in their essentially useless variety.

And when you turn away again, there on the sidewalk
is a perfect instance of the category sink,

in this case kitchen, a double stainless model
- discarded from an apartment or restaurant-
battered around the drain, humbled at its edges,

rim a little crumpled, but the interior
shining from the lifetime of scouring that's made

this singular instance of the uncountable
manifestations of its category
in all the five boroughs, and beauty

resides not within individual objects but
in the nearly unimaginable richness of their relation.

Where My Books Go

All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken'd or starry bright.

Epigram 45

The hunter in the hills
tracks down
every hare and every roe
crackling on
through frost and snow.
If someone says
"Here's a beast already shot,"
He leaves it there.
So too my lust
pants to chase
what runs away
but flits on past
what's there to stay.

translated by Stanley Lombardo and Diane Rayor