The Progress Of Œnia Poem by Allen Tate

His dim, ut fama est, vitiis ad proelia ventum est,
his Troiana vides funera principiis. PROPERTIUS.

I. MADRIGALE
Seed in your heart, warm dust transmuted
Gold, blooms in flakes of radiance
Arched in your face whereon my days,
Brinks of silence, glance.

Dream-emptied by some shifting
Monna Bice, you I resume:
Continually suffer the habitual
Cobra of my slightest gloom!

Release the happy hounds that trace
New smiles from the scampering wood
Of winter laughters-new prints of light
And trace them to your face!

II. IN WINTERTIME
I would not give the winter for a rose.
For remembering gold meadows and the hummer
Sucking them, I think June a time of pillage.
Your mouth is more passionate than any summer.

They say the spring holds many grapes
And green promises of fruit in the summer.
Give me your lips, Œnia, and let winter seas
Lash the cliffs and snows bite the grape.
We shall have passion without the sound of bees.

III. VIGIL
When you are dead and the frosty iron of laughter
Stupendously settles its pride upon your lips,
I will gather up the whispers you came after
When we first met, of immutable dissimulation.

If you are dead when the wind cries again
Over the bleak gables of an expected hour,
I will build a chapel out of the astonished pain
And wait for bells ringing in an empty tower.

IV. DIVAGATION
How many winds forget the sea!
Your dubious intention I forget
And look into the eager waste
Of your eyes careless of yesterday.

What cruel wine, what wayward gust
Tattering sun-hair to shreds of rain,
Swept you an exile to Gyrene
Blown by the swollen winds of pain,

I do not know, for we are dead:
Cluttering our youthful peace
With a various insolence, you laugh
The year, avid of love, to grief!

Our death, that was lonely, you've forgot;
Dawn came to us impatiently
Then went away with an equal fire,
Yet in an instant, in lifted night,

This desolation is alive
With backward motions of bright feet-
Remembering the madness of scaling
A certain dusk to the first small star.

V. EPILOGUE TO ŒNIA
Whatever I have said to praise
Your wrath for me in better days
Than these, when the toughening grass
Fell tenderer for you to pass,
I say again, but differently-
As a still wind in a winter tree.
Pardon me! if turning over
In the reminiscence of a lover
The leaves of a desiccate romance,
I can but wonder if a chance
Invasion of a handsomer look
Than mine began you another book?
I shan't devise the same end
For other books unless you send
Me word demanding back your hair.

Do you remember how your hair
Contained both ears? It never hid
Them quite, but climbed to a pyramid
More dazzling than superstitious kings
Set in the sand as their playthings;
And tell me, was it wantonness
Fluttering a diaphanous dress
That night at the Club when polite backs
Jazzed to the midnight cordax
And my veins raced to Seboim:
Not wantonness, but you were slim,
My dear, with a gift that I admired
For always being somehow tired!

Whatever else I say, your breast
Contained the witchery of the rest
Of a body vanished into a thought
If touched too late, or lately caught.
So more than your hair or olive eye
I remember your breast-does it still lie
Tactual billows in an upper world
Of superior sculpture, whence you hurled
Volcanic innocence and death
Out of the caverns beneath breath?
Œnia! forgive these sentiments
Of a respectful lover shattered in sense-
Yet sad that the modern bawd, grown dim,
Obscures the hotel cherubim
Whose red neckties had honored this page
In a hotter, less barbaric age;
For now the languid stertorous
Pale verses of Propertius
And the sapphire corpse undressed by Donne
(Prefiguring Rimbaud's etymon)
Have shrunk to an apotheosis
Of cold daylight after the kiss.

And since helmets of steel bone rind
The great heads of the Numerous Mind
No glories of your breast and thighs
Shall these poor verses advertise-
Only the dry debility
Of a spent wind in a winter tree.