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The splendor falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes dying, dying, dying. O hark, O hear! how thin and clear, And thinner, clearer, farther going! O sweet and far from cliff and scar The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes dying, dying, dying. O love they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field, or river: Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Outside in the street I hear A car door slam; voices coming near; Incoherent scraps of talk And high heels clicking up the walk; The doorbell rends the noonday heat With copper claws; A second's pause. The dull drums of my pulses beat Against a silence wearing thin. The door now opens from within. Oh, hear the clash of people meeting --- The laughter and the screams of greeting : Fat always, and out of breath, A greasy smack on every cheek From Aunt Elizabeth; There, that's the pink, pleased squeak Of Cousin Jane, out spinster with The faded eyes And hands like nervous butterflies; While rough as splintered wood Across them all Rasps the jarring baritone of Uncle Paul; The youngest nephew gives a fretful whine And drools at the reception line. Like a diver on a lofty spar of land Atop the flight of stairs I stand. A whirlpool leers at me, absorbent as a sponge. I cast off my identity And make the fatal plunge.

They will soon be down To one, but he still will be For a little while    still will be stopping The flakes in the air with a look, Surrounding himself with the silence Of whitening snarls. Let him eat The last red meal of the condemned To extinction, tearing the guts From an elk. Yet that is not enough For me. I would have him eat The heart, and, from it, have an idea Stream into his gnawing head That he no longer has a thing To lose, and so can walk Out into the open, in the full Pale of the sub-Arctic sun Where a single spruce tree is dying Higher and higher. Let him climb it With all his meanness and strength. Lord, we have come to the end Of this kind of vision of heaven, As the sky breaks open Its fans around him and shimmers And into its northern gates he rises Snarling    complete    in the joy of a weasel With an elk's horned heart in his stomach Looking straight into the eternal Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all My way: at the top of that tree I place The New World's last eagle Hunched in mangy feathers    giving Up on the theory of flight. Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate To the death in the rotten branches, Let the tree sway and burst into flame And mingle them, crackling with feathers, In crownfire. Let something come Of it    something gigantic    legendary Rise beyond reason over hills Of ice    SCREAMING    that it cannot die, That it has come back, this time On wings, and will spare no earthly thing: That it will hover, made purely of northern Lights, at dusk    and fall On men building roads: will perch On the moose's horn like a falcon Riding into battle    into holy war against Screaming railroad crews: will pull Whole traplines like fibers from the snow In the long-jawed night of fur trappers. But, small, filthy, unwinged, You will soon be crouching Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion Of being the last, but none of how much Your unnoticed going will mean: How much the timid poem needs The mindless explosion of your rage, The glutton's internal fire    the elk's Heart in the belly, sprouting wings, The pact of the "blind swallowing Thing," with himself, to eat The world, and not to be driven off it Until it is gone, even if it takes Forever. I take you as you are And make of you what I will, Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty Non-survivor. Lord, let me die    but not die Out.

Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be; Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing I did see. But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, More subtle than the parent is Love must not be, but take a body too; And therefore what thou wert, and who, I bid Love ask, and now That it assume thy body, I allow, And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow. Whilst thus to ballast love I thought, And so more steadily to have gone, With wares which would sink admiration, I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught; Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon Is much too much, some fitter must be sought; For, nor in nothing, nor in things Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere; Then, as an angel, face, and wings Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear, So thy love may be my love's sphere; Just such disparity As is 'twixt air and angels' purity, 'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.