5 perhaps one should say enterprise
6 out of respect for which
7 one says one need not change one's mind
8 about a thing one has believed in,
9 requiring public promises
11 to fulfill a private obligation:
12 I wonder what Adam and Eve
13 think of it by this time,
15 alive with goldenness;
16 how bright it shows---
17 ``of circular traditions and impostures,
18 committing many spoils,''
19 requiring all one's criminal ingenuity
21 Psychology which explains everything
23 and we are still in doubt.
24 Eve: beautiful woman---
26 when she was so handsome
28 able to write simultaneously
30 English, German, and French---
31 and talk in the meantime;
32 equally positive in demanding a commotion
33 and in stipulating quiet:
34 ``_I_ should like to be alone'';
35 to which the visitor replies,
36 ``I should like to be alone;
37 why not be alone together?''
38 Below the incandescent stars
39 below the incandescent fruit,
40 the strange experience of beauty;
41 its existence is too much;
42 it tears one to pieces
43 and each fresh wave of consciousness
45 ``See her, see her in this common world,''
47 in that first crystal-fine experiment,
48 this amalgamation which can never be more
49 than an interesting impossibility,
51 as ``that strange paradise
53 gold or stately buildings,
54 the choicest piece of my life:
56 in its estate of peace
58 with the rising of the water'';
59 constrained in speaking of the serpent---
60 shed snakeskin in the history of politeness
61 not to be returned to again---
62 that invaluable accident
64 And he has beauty also;
65 it's distressing---the O thou
67 without whom nothing---Adam:
69 something colubrine''---how true!
70 a crouching mythological monster
71 in that Persian miniature of emerald mines,
72 raw silk---ivory white, snow white,
73 oyster white, and six others---
74 that paddock full of leopards and giraffes---
75 long lemon-yellow bodies
76 sown with trapezoids of blue.
78 vibrating like a cymbal
79 touched before it has been struck,
80 he has prophesied correctly---
81 the industrious waterfall,
83 which violently bears all before it,
84 at one time silent as the air
85 and now powerful as the wind.''
87 on the uncertain footing of a spear,''
88 forgetting that there is in woman
90 which as an instinctive manifestation
93 in a formal customary strain,
94 of ``past states, the present state,
96 the evil one suffered,
100 to promote one's joy.''
101 In him a state of mind
102 perceives what it was not
103 intended that he should;
104 ``he experiences a solemn joy
105 in seeing that he has become an idol.''
106 Plagued by the nightingale
109 not its silence but its silences,
111 ``It clothes me with a shirt of fire.''
112 ``He dares not clap his hands
114 lest it should fly off;
115 if he does nothing, it will sleep;
116 if he cries out, it will not understand.''
117 Unnerved by the nightingale
118 and dazzled by the apple,
119 impelled by ``the illusion of a fire
120 effectual to extinguish fire,''
122 the shining of the earth
123 is but deformity---a fire
126 as long as life itself,''
127 he stumbles over marriage,
128 ``a very trivial object indeed''
129 to have destroyed the attitude
131 the ease of the philosopher
132 unfathered by a woman.
134 a kind of overgrown cupid
135 reduced to insignificance
136 by the mechanical advertising
137 parading as involuntary comment,
138 by that experiment of Adam's
139 with ways out but no way in---
140 the ritual of marriage,
141 augmenting all its lavishness;
142 its fiddlehead ferns,
143 lotus flowers, opuntias, white dromedaries,
145 nose and mouth combined
146 in one magnificent hopper---
147 its snake and the potent apple.
149 that ``for love that will
151 that is with Hercules
153 in the garden of the Hesperides,
154 from forty-five to seventy
157 as a fine art, as an experiment,
158 a duty or as nearly recreation.
159 One must not call him ruffian
160 nor friction a calamity---
161 the fight to be affectionate:
162 ``no truth can be fully known
163 until it has been tried
164 by the tooth of disputation.''
165 The blue panther with blue eyes,
167 one must give them the path---
168 the black obsidian Diana
169 who ``darkeneth her countenance
172 that has an affection for one
173 and proves it to the bone,
174 impatient to assure you
175 that impatience is the mark of independence,
177 ``Married people often look that way''---
178 ``seldom and cold, up and down,
180 with a good day and a bad.''
181 We Occidentals are so unemotional,
182 self lost, the irony preserved
183 in ``the Ahasuerus _tête-à-tête_ banquet''
184 with its small orchids like snakes' tongues,
185 with its ``good monster, lead the way,''
187 and munificence of humor
188 in that quixotic atmosphere of frankness
189 in which ``four o'clock does not exist,
191 the ladies in their imperious humility
192 are ready to receive you'';
193 in which experience attests
195 and sometimes one is made to feel it.
196 He says, ``What monarch would not blush
198 with hair like a shaving brush?''
200 is ``not the sound of the flute
202 She says, ``Men are monopolists
203 of `stars, garters, buttons
204 and other shining baubles'---
205 unfit to be the guardians
206 of another person's happiness.''
207 He says, ``These mummies
208 must be handled carefully---
209 `the crumbs from a lion's meal,
210 a couple of shins and the bit of an ear';
213 that `a wife is a coffin,'
215 with the pleasing geometry
216 stipulating space not people,
217 refusing to be buried
218 and uniquely disappointing,
219 revengefully wrought in the attitude
221 to a distinguished parent.''
222 She says, ``This butterfly,
223 this waterfly, this nomad
225 to settle on my hand for life'---
226 What can one do with it?
227 There must have been more time
229 to sit and watch a play.
230 You know so many artists who are fools.''
231 He says, ``You know so many fools
232 who are not artists.''
234 that ``some have merely rights
235 while some have obligations,''
236 he loves himself so much,
237 he can permit himself
238 no rival in that love.
239 She loves herself so much,
240 she cannot see herself enough---
241 a statuette of ivory on ivory,
242 the logical last touch
243 to an expansive splendor
244 earned as wages for work done:
245 one is not rich but poor
246 when one can always seem so right.
247 What can one do for them---
249 condemned to disaffect
250 all those who are not visionaries
251 alert to undertake the silly task
252 of making people noble?
253 This model of petrine fidelity
254 who ``leaves her peaceful husband
255 only because she has seen enough of him''---
256 that orator reminding you,
257 ``I am yours to command.''
258 ``Everything to do with love is mystery:
259 it is more than a day's work
260 to investigate this science.''
261 One sees that it is rare---
262 that striking grasp of opposites
263 opposed each to the other, not to unity,
264 which in cycloid inconclusiveness
265 have dwarfed the demonstration
266 of Columbus with the egg---
267 a triumph of simplicity---
268 that charitive Euroclydon
269 of frightening disinsterestedness
270 which the world hates,
275 I should feel it a long time;
276 I am not one of those
277 who have a great sorrow
279 and a great joy at noon'';
281 which says: ``I have encountered it
282 among those unpretentious
284 where seeming to parade
285 as the debater and the Roman,
287 of an archaic Daniel Webster
288 persists to their simplicity of temper
289 as the essence of the matter:
294 the Book on the writing-table;
295 the hand in the breast-pocket.''