Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE TEARS OF A MUSE IN AMERICA, by FRANK TEMPLETON PRINCE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE TEARS OF A MUSE IN AMERICA, by             Poem Explanation     Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Call out, celebrate the beam
Last Line: Stand silent as a tree, this verse no longer weeps.
Alternate Author Name(s): Prince, F. T.
Subject(s): United States; America


I

Call out, celebrate the beam
Imprisoning and expressing him.
Fix the mature flash for the end but in advance
Fix in the glow of that sense what shall pass.

II

Give him a pale skin, a long hand
A grey eye with deep eyelids, with deep lids.
Complete with a dark mouth the head
Of Veronese's equerry; though of too confident a grace
His gestures, less fine than his limbs. Allow him also
to sleep much
As with an effect of wantonness. Then he should
swim and run
Jump horses and touch music, laugh willingly and
grow
Among plain manners and legalities, and yet
Say where Monongahela and Alleghany
Have woven preparatives, glistening fall or where
New York assembles brittle towers. And let him,
Pleased to accomplish purposes
Alight in loose dress from a car.

III

He arrives thus with the ray of his intelligence
With what may cluster about it, dispositions
Recollections and curiosity, the state
Of reason and vision, the deceits of passion
Play of reserves, reflections, admirations
I am luminously possessed of. And all of which am
anxious
To acknowledge makes him another of the many-
minded, another
Exposed and assaulted, active and passive mind
Engaged in an adventure and interesting and interested
In itself by so being. But here solutions bristle
For the case seems to shine out at me from the moment
I grant him all the mind I can; when I in short
Impute to him an intemperate spirit, a proud wit
And in a springing innocence that still cannot undo
itself
The pallid fire I cannot if I wish, with-hold. He shall
As he does, overpraise and underprize
And outvalue and condemn all those purities and
powers
Of sight and speech, the so true so rich fleece
Covertly and attentively and often too
Fastidiously and rashly to neglect.
Here the position, action on his part, his going
In a still preserved uncertainty of light
Waits only for my touch: and there I have him
Amid the impunities of the polluted city
I see him in the stale glare of those follies,
Illiterate illuminations run to seed
Irreconcilables and abominables
Of all kinds swallowed, neither good nor bad
Either remembered or forgotten. In the dusk
There appears the full pallor of his looks
Desiring and desiring to desire
And in fine he proceeds, fanned by this dubious flush
In the way I know. It comes to me afresh
There glimmers out of it upon me that I want
Nothing to come of it at once. It glimmers,
It glimmers from the question of how, how shall it fall
The moment of the simple sight? and where
In what green land the simple sorrow? and
Under what boughs beneath whose hand wherever,
As in a fog upon the perfumed Cape,
A falling together of many gleams
Neither remembered nor forgotten and neither
Undesiring nor desiring the moment of despair?
Only say it should all as it will fall, as it fell
Or will have fallen, hanging back but to take place
All at once in the tacit air and on the ground
Of this period: the process
Of confrontation, reflection, resolution
That follows, it is this that will ascend
To the last point of fitted and related clarity.

IV

Caught in that leisurely and transparent train
Of the soft ostensibility of story
His motions and his thoughts as their own net
And while the beam folds on itself I'll not
Deny it is indefensibly too fine.
For as in smooth seas under dawn, whatever
He does he cannot do amiss
Being in these eyes seen aright
As he questionlessly is
In the white air under dawn
If he lives if he dies
He put plays at the escapes
As a dolphin or salmon leaps
And exquisite heresies
But leave the musing surface with a gleam.
So if all else be but conceivable yet
Of a lucidity that lives, himself
Mirrored may be the same,
Antecedents and foils will palliate. For
How idly miraculous
Or of what tortuous glory
In fact this creature was
How should my mere ingenuity relate?
In the great sweetness of which light
I ask if may be I have made
Though in an ecstasy of loss
At the last too little of it? But at least
Since I have seen him clear,
Whether he fondle a golden mare
Which he has ridden through wet woods
Or in the sunlight by the water
Stand silent as a tree, this verse no longer weeps.




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