L\u27Apres Midi d\u27une...

A picnic was spread on the bank and they surrounded it in positions of spiritual abandon. One, a long and somewhat undulant girl, lay among them gazing into the river that rolled peacefully yet dense with clay after the spring flood. The opposite bank, mysterious as an arabesque, hid in its shadow-work of trees the lives that like theirs, had moved back from afternoon; lives bound to the waterway by probing beak and wading leg, by a diet of fish or of insects Whose larval time is passed in mud and water. Look closely! implied the arabesque: a leaf may become a bird

The Shepheard\u27s Calendar

In the first eclogue and the last, Colin Clout addresses Pan, complaining about his life. These are the only two eclogues in monologue; they are different in scope but with many comparable passages; and they are the only two in the particularly sustained musical rhyme scheme of iambic pentameter sixains ryhmed ababcc. But in January, Colin is immature, in December he has grown old. In the two complaints, Spenser subtly communicates the vast difference in Colin\u27s experience-he is comprehensive, as in February he only plays. Through images of his relationship with nature, first so superficial and comradely and demonstrative, deepening into reality and resignation with a passion that, having ceased to battle, will spend itself in wonder; turning his life to fit a year, the four ages with the four seasons, Spenser tells a serious story of experience. There is room for a lot of comparison in the two eclogues, but we shall have time only for a glance

Jesu Maria 1960

The massive bell, resting on the rug in their living-room amid its travelling - wrappings, was much larger than they had expected. The girl and her mother felt their cottage grow smaller like a rock surrounded by rising tide. They were not inclined to discuss the bell in its presence, lest their minds turn on them with salty and even rude criticism from the inanimate thing\u27s point of view; but they noticed for the first time how poor was the view from their windows, which did not look to sea. It was a great iron bell, with rust scoured thin to dust of Orient cinnamon; and on the inside, except where the tongue had struck, it was incrusted with salt. Around it a band of raised iron words said, Jesu Maria 1690, with no comma between

Sonnet 29

THE boy Argus, who is nineteen, with palette colors in the carriers of his fingers, turns back to the house as if to make a last precautionary round before a journey. Instead he has decided to stay. He leaves his belongings in the debris of the hall. A cat from the end of the hall peers and they exchange reserves across silence heavy but for a hum, compoundly powerful and accustomed, like a thousand cats purring, or as a tornado may sound to those it has left behind, with implication eternal, both retrospective and ominous; from the core of which pierces a steady tapping of his father\u27s typewriter. The boy starts to go through the rooms when something rises Ind catches in his throat, a cough or a cry, unclasping time that rolls out before him. \u27How did it begin? By what way have I come?\u2

Poems

Includes: EQUINOX: WIND AND TREES and AFTER EQUINO

The Lost Children

The children passed Mrs. Sibling\u27s window as she was having supper. The corner lamp had just gone on, and no one had passed on the street for a long while. They straggled across the window, which she faced like a companion across table; one family, she thought, poor and dignified -for Mrs. Sibling, although retired, never would cease to be a social worker-all different sizes, of whom first one and then another took the lead in a pseudopodic motion from the mass, only to draw in uncertainly. They progressed as slowly as the littlest boy who dragged his feet and was growing chilly in his sun suit. Reaching the corner lamp, they stood swaying under it, looking up at the street sign. Then they turned back

Beauty

Yet afterward, she finds her thoughts returning again .and again to the garden. Somehow, she does not know quite why, it seems as if she holds it in the palms of both hands, there with the programme de ballet

The Locks

He came out into the sun. Spice of wood-dust hung over the line of shanties following the canal; it was the dust of their houses baking on the bare packed bank that scarcely lifted above the water Waiting passively behind the bridge. Sometimes little clapping water-hands beat against the iron doors of the locks beneath the bridge, beat against the concrete sides of the bridge, beat, clapped, despaired, and fell. Brown and oily and dusty, the water lay with a strange subservient beauty behind the locks, moving round and round ever so slowly, as if it must remember motion while it waited..

Our House

I have left my wife in the village to arrange for the rental of a rowboat, and to find shelter for our car which no longer is of use, while I go ahead to open the house. It is strange to be out under sky again; to think that as a biologist, working on the elements of life, I am so long absent from life that others know unquestioningly. The experiment is behind, and summer ahead, to rest and arrange my notes without interruption in the house we have leased atop the cliff by the sea

Swift

He is a Swift, Lichen alive; Pine cone with legs And a fleeting fir