Collected Earlier Poems

Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht Page B

Book: Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht Read Free Book Online
Authors: Anthony Hecht
Ads: Link
answered her, “Youth wants no emphasis,
    But in extravagance of nature shows
    A rigor more demanding than precise.”
IV
    “Pride is an illness rising out of pain,”
    Said the ensnaffled Fiend who would not wince.
    Does the neat corollary then obtain,
    Humility comes burgeoning from pleasure?
    Ah, masters, such a calculus is foul,
    Of no more substance than a wasting cloud.
    I cannot frame a logic to convince
    Your honors of the urgent lawless measure
    Of love, the which is neither fish nor fowl.
    The meekest rise to tumble with the proud.
V
    Goliath lies upon his back in Hell.
    Out of his nostrils march a race of men,
    Each with a little spear of hair; they yell,
    “Attack the goat! O let us smite the goat!”
    (An early German vision.) They are decked
    With horns and beards and trappings of the brute
    Capricorn, who remarked their origin.
    Love, like a feather in a Roman throat,
    Returned their suppers. They could not connect
    Sentiment with a craving so acute.
VI
    Those paragraphs most likely to arouse
    Pear-shaped nuances to an ovoid brain,
    Upstanding nipples under a sheer blouse,
    Wink from the bold original, and keep
    Their wicked parlance to confound the lewd
    American, deftly obscured from sin
    By the Fig-Leaf Edition of Montaigne.
    But “summer nights were not devised for sleep,”
    And who can cipher out, however shrewd,
    The Man-in-the-Moon’s microcephalic grin?
AS PLATO SAID
    These public dances and other exercises of the young maidens naked, in the sight of the young men, were moreover incentives to marriage; and to use Plato’s expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attraction of love as a geometrical conclusion is drawn from the premises.
     PLUTARCH
    Although I do not not know your name, although
    It was a silly dance you did with apple flowers
    Bunched in your hands after the racing games,
    My friends and I have spent these several hours
    Watching. Although I do not know your name,
    I saw the sun dress half of you with shadow, and I saw
    The wind water your eyes as though with tears
    Until they flashed like newly-pointed spears.
    This afternoon there was a giant daw
    Turning above us—though I put no trust
    In all these flying omens, being just
    A plain man and a warrior, like my friends—
    Yet I am mastered by uncommon force
    And made to think of you, although it blends
    Not with my humor, or the businesses
    Of soldiering. I have seen a horse
    Moving with more economy, and know
    Armor is surer than a girl’s promises.
    But it is a compelling kind of law
    Puts your design before me, even though
    I put no faith or fancy in that daw
    Turning above us. There’s some rigor here,
    More than in nature’s daily masterpiece
    That brings for us, with absolute and clear
    Insistence, worms from their midnight soil,
    Ungodly honk and trumpeting of geese
    In the early morning, and at last the toil
    Of soldiering. This is a simple code,
    Far simpler than Lycurgus has set down.
    The sheep come out of the hills, the sheep come down
    When it rains, or gather under a tree,
    And in the damp they stink most heartily.
    Yet the hills are not so tough but they will yield
    Brass for the kitchen, and the soft wet hair
    Of the sheep will occupy some fingers. In the bottom fields
    The herd’s deposit shall assist the spring
    Out of the earth and up into the air.
    No. There is not a more unbending thing
    In nature. It is an order that shall find
    You out. There’s not a season or a bird can bring
    You to my senses or so harness me
    To my intention. Let the Helots mind
    The barley fields, lest they should see a daw
    Turning to perch on some adjacent tree
    And fancy it their sovereign ruler. No.
    However we are governed, it shall draw
    Both of us to its own conclusion, though
    I do not even know you by your name.
DISCOURSE CONCERNING TEMPTATION
    Though learned men have been at some dispute
    Touching the taste and color, nature, name
    And properties of the Original Fruit,
    The bees that in midsummer

Similar Books

Darkest Hour

James Holland

Tracked by Terror

Brad Strickland

Assignment to Disaster

Edward S. Aarons

Morgan the Rogue

Lynn Granville