In serene irony the infinite azure, Languidly lovely as the flowers, smites The impotent poet cursing his genius Across a barren wilderness of Sorrows. Fleeing with eyes closed, I feel it probe Deep as a racking remorse My empty soul. Where escape? And what eerie night To hurl, O remains, against this heart-mangling scorn? O fogs, come forth! Pour your monotonous ashes In long shreds of haze across the skies, Drowning the livid quagmire of the autumns And rearing a vast ceiling of silence! And you, from the lethal morasses emerge and gather As you come the slime and the vapid reeds, Dear Ennui, to stuff with untiring hands The great blue holes the birds maliciously make. More! Let the sad chimneys unceasingly Smoke, and a wandering prison of soot Blot out in the horror of their murky trails The sun dying yellowish on the horizon! -The Sky is dead. -Toward you I run! O matter, give Oblivion of the cruel Ideal and of Sin To this martyr who comes to share the straw Where men's contented cattle lie, For here I wish, since at the last my brain, empty As the pot of paint lying at the foot of a wall, The art to adorn the woeful Idea possesses no more, To yawn disconsolately to a desolate death . . . In vain! The Azure triumphs, and in the bells I hear it sing. My soul, it becomes a voice Instilling us with fear anew of its awful victory, And from the living metal comes in bluenesses the Angelus! It whirls through the mist as of old and cleaves Like a resolute sword your intrinsic agony; In the helpless and hopeless revolt what escape? @3I am obsessed.@1 The Azure! The Azure! The Azure! The Azure! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SIXTEEN MONTHS by CARL SANDBURG THE SHADOWY WATERS: A DRAMATIC POEM by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS OUR CHRIST by HARRY WEBB FARRINGTON KATHLEEN O'MORE by GEORGE NUGENT REYNOLDS THE REAR-GUARD by SIEGFRIED SASSOON |