Prelude to an Evening: A Poem Revised and Explicated

Do not enforce the tired wolf
Dragging his infected wound homeward
To sit tonight with the warm children
Saying the pretty Kings of France.

The images of the invaded mind
Are monstrous only in the dreams
Of your most brief enchanted headful.
Suppose a miracle of confusion:—

That dreamed and undreamt become each other
And mix the night and day of your soul.
For it never mattered your twice crying
From mouth unbeautied against the pillow

To avert the gun of the same old soldier,
If surely cry, cock-crow or bell
Breaking the improbable black spell
Annihilated the poor phantom.

But now, by our confirmed supposal,
Apparition waits upon sunny mornings;
You in your peignoir dividing the oranges;
But gathering its strength in the shadowed places

Invisible evil, deprived and bold.
The day-long clock will metronome
Your gallant fear; the needles clicking;
The heels detonating the stair’s cavern.

Freshening the water in the blue bowls
For the buckberries with not all your love
You shall be listening for a low wind,
And the waming sibilance of pines.

Finally evening. Hear me denouncing
Our equal and conniving Furies;
You making Noes but they lack conviction;
Smoothing the heads of the hungry children.

I would have us magnficent at my coming;
Two souls tight-clasped; and a swamp of horrors.
O you shall be handsome and brave at fearing.
Now my step quickens; and meets a huge

No! Whose No was it? like the hoarse policeman’s,
Clopping onstage in the Name of the Law.
That was Me; forbidding tricks at homecoming;
At the moment of coming to its white threshold.

I went to the nations of disorder
To be freed of the memory of good and evil;
There even your image was disfigured;
Then the boulevards rocked; they said, Go back.

I am here; and to balk my ruffian I bite
The tongue devising all that treason;
Then creep in my wounds to the sovereign flare
Of the room where you shine on the good children.

And now for the commentary. “Prelude to an Evening,” in twelve stanzas, is a new version of the original poem by that title, which had eight stanzas and was published thirty years ago. In the new poem the eight stanzas remain substantially about what they were before. If some of them have been tinkered with, that is according to the luxurious habit of poets who, when an old poem comes up for republication, like to induce the whole delicious process of composition over again, and even try to make a few fresh beauties here and there if they can. The big change is the addition of four new stanzas at the end. They are like the others in form, being quatrains of unrhymed four-beat lines which mostly are end-stopped. It was my hope that the new stanzas would be like enough in tempo and style to keep continuity with the old ones as if by a single act of composition. But I am afraid that these so new and so few stanzas, which have so much to do in so short a space, may be too brisk to suit with the others. What they must do is nothing less than undo the whole intention of the old poem, and bring it to a very different conclusion.