TREES

Tuscan cypresses, What is it? Folded in like a dark thought For which the language is lost, Tuscan cypresses, Is there a great secret? Are our words no good? The undeliverable secret, Dead with a dead race and a dead speech, and yet Darkly monumental in you, Etruscan cypresses. Ah, how I admire your fidelity, Dark cypresses, Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans? The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans, Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves? Among the sinuous, flame-tall cypresses That swayed their length of darkness all around Etruscan-dusky, wavering men of old Etruria: Naked except for fanciful long shoes, Going with insidious, half-smiling quietness And some of Africa’s imperturbable sang-froid About a forgotten business. What business, then? Nay, tongues are dead, and words are hollow as hollow seed-pods, Having shed their sound and finished all their echoing Etruscan syllables, That had the telling. Yet more I see you darkly concentrate, Tuscan cypresses, On one old thought: On one old slim imperishable thought, while you remain Etruscan cypresses; Dusky, slim marrow-thought of slender, flickering men of Etruria, Whom Rome called vicious. Vicious, dark cypresses: Vicious, you supple, brooding, softly-swaying pillars of dark flame. Monumental to a dead, dead race Embalmed in you! Were they then vicious, the slender, tender-footed, Long-nosed men of Etruria? Or was their way only evasive and different, dark, like cypress-trees in a wind? They are dead, with all their vices, And all that is left Is the shadowy monomania of some cypresses And tombs. The smile, the subtle Etruscan smile still lurking Within the tombs, Etruscan cypresses. He laughs longest who laughs last; Nay, Leonardo only bungled the pure Etruscan smile. What would I not give To bring back the rare and orchid-like Evil-yclept Etruscan? For as to the evil We have only Roman word for it, Which I, being a little weary of Roman virtue, Don’t hang much weight on. For oh, I know, in the dust where we have buried The silenced races and all their abominations, We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life. There in the deeps That churn the frankincense and ooze the myrrh, Cypress shadowy, Such an aroma of lost human life! They say the fit survive, But I invoke the spirits of the lost. Those that have not survived, the darkly lost, To bring their meaning back into life again, Which they have taken away And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees, Etruscan cypresses. Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still. Fiesole.

Fig-trees, weird fig-trees Made of thick smooth silver, Made of sweet, untarnished silver in the sea-southern air— I say untarnished, but I mean opaque— Thick, smooth-fleshed silver, dull only as human limbs are dull With the life-lustre, Nude with the dim light of full, healthy life That is always half-dark, And suave like passion-flower petals, Like passion-flowers, With the half-secret gleam of a passion-flower hanging from the rock, Great, complicated, nude fig-tree, stemless flower-mesh, Flowerily naked in flesh, and giving off hues of life. Rather like an octopus, but strange and sweet-myriad-limbed octopus; Like a nude, like a rock-living, sweet-fleshed sea-anemone, Flourishing from the rock in a mysterious arrogance. Let me sit down beneath the many-branching candelabrum That lives upon this rock And laugh at Time, and laugh at dull Eternity, And make a joke of stale Infinity, Within the flesh-scent of this wicked tree, That has kept so many secrets up its sleeve, And has been laughing through so many ages At man and his uncomfortablenesses, And his attempt to assure himself that what is so is not so, Up its sleeve. Let me sit down beneath this many-branching candelabrum, The Jewish seven-branched, tallow-stinking candlestick kicked over the cliff And all its tallow righteousness got rid of, And let me notice it behave itself. And watch it putting forth each time to heaven, Each time straight to heaven, With marvellous naked assurance each single twig Each one setting off straight to the sky As if it were the leader, the main-stem, the forerunner, Intent to hold the candle of the sun upon its socket-tip, It alone. Every young twig No sooner issued sideways from the thigh of his predecessor Than off he starts without a qualm To hold the one and only lighted candle of the sun in his socket-tip. He casually gives birth to another young bud from his thigh, Which at once sets off to be the one and only, And hold the lighted candle of the sun. Oh many-branching candelabrum, oh strange up-starting fig-tree, Oh weird Demos, where every twig is the arch twig, Each imperiously over-equal to each, equality over-reaching itself Like the snakes on Medusa’s head, Oh naked fig-tree! Still, no doubt every one of you can be the sun-socket as well as every other of you. Demos, Demos, Demos! Demon, too, Wicked fig-tree, equality puzzle, with your self-conscious secret fruits. Taormina.

Wet almond-trees, in the rain, Like iron sticking grimly out of earth; Black almond trunks, in the rain, Like iron implements twisted, hideous, out of the earth, Out of the deep, soft fledge of Sicilian winter-green, Earth-grass uneatable, Almond trunks curving blackly, iron-dark, climbing the slopes. Almond-tree, beneath the terrace rail, Black, rusted, iron trunk, You have welded your thin stems finer, Like steel, like sensitive steel in the air, Grey, lavender, sensitive steel, curving thinly and brittly up in a parabola. What are you doing in the December rain? Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips? Do you feel the air for electric influences Like some strange magnetic apparatus? Do you take in messages, in some strange code, From heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so constantly round Etna? Do you take the whisper of sulphur from the air? Do you hear the chemical accents of the sun? Do you telephone the roar of the waters over the earth? And from all this, do you make calculations? Sicily, December’s Sicily in a mass of rain With iron branching blackly, rusted like old, twisted implements And brandishing and stooping over earth’s wintry fledge, climbing the slopes Of uneatable soft green! Taormina.