mon semblable, mon frère
(1) 
Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction 
In that perspective of the action 
Which pictures us inhabiting the end 
Of everything with death for only friend. 


Not that we love death, 
Not truly, not the fluttering breath, 
The obscene shudder of the finished act? 
What the doe feels when the ultimate fact 
Tears at her bowels with its jaws. 


Our taste is for the opulent pause 
Before the end comes. If the end is certain 
All of us are players at the final curtain: 
All of us, silence for a time deferred, 
Find time before us for one sad last word. 
Victim, rebel, convert, stoic? 
Every role but the heroic? 
We turn our tragic faces to the stalls 
To wince our moment till the curtain falls. 
(2) 
A world ends when its metaphor has died. 

An age becomes an age, all else beside, 
When sensuous poets in their pride invent 
Emblems for the soul?s consent 
That speak the meanings men will never know 
But man-imagined images can show: 
It perishes when those images, though seen, 
No longer mean. 


(3) 
A world was ended when the womb 
Where girl held God became the tomb 
Where God lies buried in a man: 
Botticelli?s image neither speaks nor can 
To our kind. His star-guided stranger 
Teaches no longer, by the child, the manger, 
The meaning of the beckoning skies. 


Sophocles, when his reverent actors rise 
To play the king with bleeding eyes, 
No longer shows us on the stage advance 
God?s purpose in the terrible fatality of chance. 


No woman living, when the girl and swan 
Embrace in verses, feels upon 
Her breast the awful thunder of that breast 
Where God, made beast, is by the blood confessed. 


Empty as conch shell by the waters cast 
The metaphor still sounds but cannot tell, 
And we, like parasite crabs, put on the shell 
And drag it at the sea?s edge up and down. 


This is the destiny we say we own. 

(4) 
But are we sure 
The age that dies upon its metaphor 
Among these Roman heads, these mediaeval towers, 
Is ours?? 
Or ours the ending of that story? 
The meanings in a man that quarry 
Images from blinded eyes 
And white birds and the turning skies 
To make a world of were not spent with these 
Abandoned presences. 


The journey of our history has not ceased: 
Earth turns us still toward the rising east, 
The metaphor still struggles in the stone, 
The allegory of the flesh and bone 
Still stares into the summer grass 
That is its glass, 
The ignorant blood 
Still knocks at silence to be understood. 


Poets, deserted by the world before, 
Turn round into the actual air: 
Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!