MARCH 1914.
ABOARD SHIP IN THE SUEZ CANAL.
TRIUMPHAL ODE
By the painful light of the factory’s huge electric lamps
I write in a fever.
I write gnashing my teeth, rabid for the beauty of all this,
For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients.
O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r-r!
Bridled convulsiveness of raging mechanisms!
Raging in me and outside me,
Through all my dissected nerves,
Through all the papillae of everything I feel with!
My lips are parched, O great modern noises,
From hearing you at too close a range,
And my head burns with the desire to proclaim you
In an explosive song telling my every sensation,
An explosiveness contemporaneous with you, O machines!
Gaping deliriously at the engines as at a tropical landscape
—Great human tropics of iron and fire and energy—
I sing, I sing the present, and the past and future too,
Because the present is all the past and all the future:
Plato and Virgil exist in the machines and electric lights
For the simple reason that Virgil and Plato once existed and
were human,
And bits of an Alexander the Great from perhaps the fiftieth
century
As well as atoms that will seethe in the brain of a
hundredth-century Aeschylus
Go round these transmission belts and pistons and flywheels,
Roaring, grinding, thumping, humming, rattling,
Caressing my body all over with one caress of my soul.
If I could express my whole being like an engine!
If I could be complete like a machine!
If I could go triumphantly through life like the latest model
car!
If at least I could inject all this into my physical being,
Rip myself wide open, and become pervious
To all the perfumes from the oils and hot coals
Of this stupendous, artificial and insatiable black flora!
Brotherhood with all dynamics!
Promiscuous fury of being a moving part
In the cosmopolitan iron rumble
Of unflagging trains,
In the freight-carrying toil of ships,
In the slow and smooth turning of cranes,
In the disciplined tumult of factories,
And in the humming, monotonic near-silence of transmission
belts!
Productive European hours, wedged
Between machines and practical matters!
Big cities that stop for a moment in cafés,
In cafés, those oases of useless chatter
Where the sounds and gestures of the Useful
Crystallize and precipitate,
And with them the wheels, cogwheels and ball bearings of
Progress!
New soulless Minerva of wharfs and train stations!
New enthusiasms commensurate with the Moment!
Iron-plated keels smiling on docksides,
Or raised out of the water, on harbor slipways!
International, transatlantic, Canadian Pacific activity!
Lights and time frantically wasted in bars, in hotels,
At Longchamps, at Derbies and at Ascots,
And Piccadillies and Avenues de l’Opéra entering straight
Into my soul!
Hey streets, hey squares, hey bustling crowd!
Everything that passes, everything that stops before shop
windows!
Businessmen, bums, con men in dressy clothes,
Proud members of aristocratic clubs,
Squalid, dubious characters, and vaguely happy family men
Who are paternal even in the gold chains crossing their vests
From one to another pocket!
Everything that passes, passing without ever passing!
The overemphatic presence of prostitutes;
The interesting banality (and who knows what’s inside?)
Of bourgeois ladies, usually mother and daughter,
Walking down the street on some errand or other;
The falsely feminine grace of sauntering homosexuals;
And all the simply elegant people who parade down the street
And who also, after all, have a soul!
(Ah, how I’d love to be the pander of all this!)
The dazzling beauty of graft and corruption,
Delicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
Politically motivated assaults on the streets,
And every now and then the comet of a regicide
Lighting up with Awe and Fanfare the usual
Clear skies of everyday Civilization!
Fraudulent reports in the newspapers,
Insincerely sincere political articles,
Sensationalist news, crime stories—
Two columns and continued on the next page!
The fresh smell of printer’s ink!
The posters that were just put up, still wet!
Yellow books in white wrappers—vient de paraître!
How I love all of you, every last one of you!
How I love all of you, in every way possible,
With my eyes, ears, and sense of smell,
With touch (how much it means for me to touch you!)
And with my mind, like an antenna that quivers because of you!
Ah, how all my senses lust for you!
Fertilizers, steam threshers, breakthroughs in farming!
Agricultural chemistry, and commerce a quasi-science!
O sample cases of traveling salesmen,
Those traveling salesmen who are Industry’s knights-errant,
Human extensions of the factories and quiet offices!
O fabrics in shop windows! O mannequins! O latest fashions!
O useless items that everyone wants to buy!
Hello enormous department stores!
Hello electric signs that flash on, glare, and disappear!
Hello everything used to build today, to make it different
from yesterday!
Hey cement, reinforced concrete, new technologies!
The improvements in gloriously lethal weapons!
Armor, cannons, machine-guns, submarines, airplanes!
I love all of you and all things like a beast.
I love you carnivorously,
Pervertedly, wrapping my eyes
All around you, O great and banal, useful and useless things,
O absolutely modern things my contemporaries,
O present and proximate form
Of the immediate system of the Universe!
New metallic and dynamic Revelation of God!
O factories, O laboratories, O music halls, O amusement
parks,
O battleships, O bridges, O floating docks—
In my restless, ardent mind
I possess you like a beautiful woman,
I completely possess you like a beautiful woman who isn’t
loved
But who fascinates the man who happens to meet her.
Hey-ya façades of big stores!
Hey-ya elevators of tall buildings!
Hey-ya major cabinet reshufflings!
Policy decisions, parliaments, budget officers,
Trumped-up budgets!
(A budget is as natural as a tree
And a parliament as beautiful as a butterfly.)
Hi-ya the fascination of everything in life,
Because everything is life, from the diamonds in shop windows
To the mysterious bridge of night between the stars
And the ancient, solemn sea that laps the shores
And is mercifully the same
As when Plato was Plato
In his real presence, in his flesh
that had a soul,
And he spoke with Aristotle, who was not to be his disciple.
I could be shredded to death by an engine
And feel a woman’s sweet surrender when possessed.
Toss me into the furnaces!
Throw me under passing trains!
Thrash me aboard ships!
Masochism through machines!
Some modern sort of sadism, and I, and the hubbub!
Alley-oop jockey who won the Derby,
Oh to sink my teeth into your two-colored cap!
(To be so tall that I couldn’t pass through any door!
Ah, gazing is for me a sexual perversion!)
Hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, cathedrals!
Let me bash my head against the edges of your stones,
And be picked up from the ground, a bloody mess,
Without anyone knowing who I am!
O streetcars, cable cars, subways,
Graze and scrape me until I rave in ecstasy!
Hey-ya, hey-ya, hey-ya-ho!
Laugh in my face,
O cars full of carousers and whores,
O daily swarm of pedestrians neither sad nor happy,
Motley anonymous river where I’d love to swim but can’t!
Ah, what complex lives, what things inside their homes!
Ah, to know all about them, their financial troubles,
Their domestic quarrels, their unsuspected depravities,
Their thoughts when all alone in their bedrooms,
And their gestures when no one can see them!
Not to know these things is to be ignorant of everything,
O rage,
O rage that like a fever or a hunger or a mad lust
Makes my face haggard and my hands prone to shaking
With absurd contractions in the middle of the crowds
Pushing and shoving on the streets!
Ah, and the ordinary, sordid people who always look the same,
Who use swearwords like regular words,
Whose sons steal from grocers
And whose eight-year-old daughters (and I think this is
sublime!)
Masturbate respectable-looking men in stairwells.
The rabble who spend all day on scaffolds and walk home
On narrow lanes of almost unreal squalor.
Wondrous human creatures who live like dogs,
Who are beneath all moral systems,
For whom no religion was invented,
No art created,
No politics formulated!
How I love all of you for being what you are,
Neither good nor evil, too humble to be immoral,
Impervious to all progress,
Wondrous fauna from the depths of the sea of life!
(The donkey goes round and round
The water wheel in my yard,
And this is the measure of the world’s mystery.
Wipe off your sweat with your arm, disgruntled worker.
The sunlight smothers the silence of the spheres
And we must all die,
O gloomy pine groves at twilight,
Pine groves where my childhood was different
From what I am today . . . )
Ah, but once more the incessant mechanical rage!
Once more the obsessive motion of buses.
And once more the fury of traveling in every train in the
world
At the same time,
Of saying farewell from the deck of every ship
Which at this moment is weighing anchor or drawing away
from a dock.
O iron, O steel, O aluminum, O corrugated sheet metal!
O wharfs, O ports, O trains, O cranes, O tugboats!
Hi-ya great train disasters!
Hi-ya caved-in mineshafts!
Hi-ya exquisite shipwrecks of great ocean liners!
Hi-ya-ho revolutions here, there and everywhere,
Constitutional changes, wars, treaties, invasions,
Outcries, injustice, violence, and perhaps very soon the end,
The great invasion of yellow barbarians across Europe,
And another Sun on the new Horizon!
But what does it matter? What does all this matter
To the glowing, red-hot racket of today,
To the delicious, cruel racket of modern civilization?
All this erases everything except the Moment,
The Moment with its bare chest as hot as a stoker’s,
The shrill and mechanical Moment,
The dynamic Moment of all the bacchantes
Of iron and bronze and the drunk ecstasy of metals.
Hey trains, hey bridges, hey hotels at dinnertime,
Hey iron tools, heavy tools, minuscule and other tools,
Precision instruments, grinding tools, digging tools,
Mills, drills, and rotary devices!
Hey! hey! hey!
Hey electricity, Matter’s aching nerves!
Hey wireless telegraphy, metallic sympathy of the
Unconscious!
Hey tunnels, hey Panama, Kiel and Suez canals!
Hey all the past inside the present!
Hey all the future already inside us! Hey!
Hey! hey! hey!
Useful iron fruits of the cosmopolitan factory-tree!
Hey! hey! hey! Hey-ya-hi-ya!
I’m oblivious to my inward existence. I turn, I spin,
I forge myself.
I’m coupled to every train.
I’m hoisted up on every dock.
I spin in the propellers of every ship.
Hey! hey-ya! hey!
Hey! I’m mechanical heat and electricity!
Hey! and the railways and engine rooms and Europe!
Hey and hooray for all in all and all in me, machines at
work, hey!
To leap with everything over everything! Alley-oop!
Alley-oop, alley-oop, alley-oop-la, alley-oop!
Hey-ya, hi-ya! Ho-o-o-o-o!
Whir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!
Ah if only I could be all people and all places!
LONDON, JUNE 1914.
EXCERPTS FROM TWO ODES
I
Come, ancient and unchanging Night,
Queen Night who was born dethroned,
Night inwardly equal to silence, Night
With sequin-stars that flicker
In your dress fringed by Infinity.
Come faintly,
Come softly,
Come alone, solemn, with hands hanging
At your sides, come
And bring the far-off hills as near as the nearby trees,
Merge every field I see into your one field,
Make the mountain one more block of your body,
Erase all its differences I see from afar,
All the roads that climb it,
All the varied trees that make it dark green in the distance,
All the white houses whose smoke rises through the trees,
And leave just one light, and another light, and one more
light
In the hazy and vaguely troubling distance,
In the distance that’s suddenly impossible to cross.
Our Lady
Of the impossible things we seek in vain,
Of the dreams that come to us at dusk, by the window,
Of the plans that caress us
On sweeping terraces of cosmopolitan hotels
To the European sound of songs and voices near and far
And that pain us, for we know we’ll never carry them out . . .
Come lull us,
Come cuddle us,
Kiss us softly on the forehead,
So gently on the forehead we wouldn’t know we’d been
kissed
Were it not for a slight change in our soul
And the hint of a sigh rising melodiously
From the most ancient part of us
; In which are rooted all those wondrous trees
Whose fruits are the dreams we love and cherish
Because we know they have nothing to do with the things
of life.
Come ever so solemnly,
Solemn and full
Of a secret desire to weep,
Perhaps because the soul is vast and life small,
And none of our gestures ever leaves our body,
And we can reach only as far as our arm reaches,
And can see only as far as our sight extends.
Come, ever sorrowful,
Mater Dolorosa of the Sufferings of the Meek,
Turris Eburnea of the Sorrows of the Scorned,
Cool hand on the feverish brow of the Humble,
Taste of water on the parched lips of the Weary.
Come out from the depths
Of the pallid horizon,
Come pull me out
Of the soil of anxiety and barrenness
Where I thrive.
Pluck me, a forgotten daisy, from my soil.
Read in my petals I can’t imagine what fortune
And strip them off to your satisfaction,
Your cool and quiet satisfaction.
Fling one of my petals to the North,
Home to the cities of Today I so loved.
Fling another of my petals to the South,
Home to the seas the Navigators plowed.
Throw another petal Westward,
Where what seems to be the Future glows red hot,
And I adore it even though it’s unknown to me.
And throw another, the others, all that’s left of me
To the East,
To the East from where everything comes, faith and the new
day,
To the grandiose and fanatic and warm East,
To the extravagant East which I’ll never see,
To the Buddhist, Brahmanist, Shintoist East,
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Page 11
