I placed a jar in Tennessee, / And round it was, upon a hill. / It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill. / The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild. / The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air. / It took dominion everywhere. / The jar was gray and bare. / It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The houses are haunted / By white night-gowns. / None are green, / Or purple with green rings, / Or green with yellow rings, / Or yellow with blue rings. / None of them are strange, / With socks of lace / And beaded ceintures. / People are not going / To dream of baboons and periwinkles. / Only, here and there, an old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots, / Catches tigers / In red weather.

I / Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the green freedom of a cockatoo / Upon a rug mingle to dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. / She dreams a little, and she feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe, / As a calm darkens among water-lights. / The pungent oranges and bright, green wings / Seem things in some procession of the dead, / Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like wide water, without sound, / Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet / Over the seas, to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. / II / Why should she give her bounty to the dead? / What is divinity if it can come / Only in silent shadows and in dreams? / Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, / In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else / In any balm or beauty of the earth, / Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? / Divinity must live within herself: / Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; / Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued / Elations when the forest blooms; gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the winter branch. / These are the measures destined for her soul. / III / Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. / No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave / Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind. / He moved among us, as a muttering king, / Magnificent, would move among his hinds, / Until our blood, commingling, virginal, / With heaven, brought such requital to desire / The very hinds discerned it, in a star. / Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be / The blood of paradise? And shall the earth / Seem all of paradise that we shall know? / The sky will be much friendlier then than now, / A part of labor and a part of pain, / And next in glory to enduring love, / Not this dividing and indifferent blue. / IV / She says, “I am content when wakened birds, / Before they fly, test the reality / Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; / But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields / Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” / There is not any haunt of prophecy, / Nor any old chimera of the grave, / Neither the golden underground, nor isle / Melodious, where spirits gat them home, / Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm / Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured / As April’s green endures; or will endure / Like her remembrance of awakened birds, / Or her desire for June and evening, tipped / By the consummation of the swallow’s wings. / V / She says, “But in contentment I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss.” / Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams / And our desires. Although she strews the leaves / Of sure obliteration on our paths, / The path sick sorrow took, the many paths / Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love / Whispered a little out of tenderness, / She makes the willow shiver in the sun / For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze / Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. / She causes boys to pile new plums and pears / On disregarded plate. The maidens taste / And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. / VI / Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs / Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, / Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, / With rivers like our own that seek for seas / They never find, the same receding shores / That never touch with inarticulate pang? / Why set the pear upon those river-banks / Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? / Alas, that they should wear our colors there, / The silken weavings of our afternoons, / And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! / Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, / Within whose burning bosom we devise / Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. / VII / Supple and turbulent, a ring of men / Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn / Their boisterous devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source. / Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, / Out of their blood, returning to the sky; / And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, / The windy lake wherein their lord delights, / The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, / That choir among themselves long afterward. / They shall know well the heavenly fellowship / Of men that perish and of summer morn. / And whence they came and whither they shall go / The dew upon their feet shall manifest. / VIII / She hears, upon that water without sound, / A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” / We live in an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night, / Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, / Of that wide water, inescapable. / Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; / Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; / And,

The man bent over his guitar, / A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. / They said, "You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are." / The man replied, "Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar." / And they said then, "But play, you must, / A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, / A tune upon the blue guitar / Of things exactly as they are."

I / Among twenty snowy mountains,    / The only moving thing    / Was the eye of the blackbird.    / II / I was of three minds,    / Like a tree    / In which there are three blackbirds.    / III / The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.    / It was a small part of the pantomime.    / IV / A man and a woman    / Are one.    / A man and a woman and a blackbird    / Are one.    / V / I do not know which to prefer,    / The beauty of inflections    / Or the beauty of innuendoes,    / The blackbird whistling    / Or just after.    / VI / Icicles filled the long window    / With barbaric glass.    / The shadow of the blackbird    / Crossed it, to and fro.    / The mood    / Traced in the shadow    / An indecipherable cause.    / VII / O thin men of Haddam,    / Why do you imagine golden birds?    / Do you not see how the blackbird    / Walks around the feet    / Of the women about you?    / VIII / I know noble accents    / And lucid, inescapable rhythms;    / But I know, too,    / That the blackbird is involved    / In what I know.    / IX / When the blackbird flew out of sight,    / It marked the edge    / Of one of many circles.    / X / At the sight of blackbirds    / Flying in a green light,    / Even the bawds of euphony    / Would cry out sharply.    / XI / He rode over Connecticut    / In a glass coach.    / Once, a fear pierced him,    / In that he mistook    / The shadow of his equipage    / For blackbirds.    / XII / The river is moving.    / The blackbird must be flying.    / XIII / It was evening all afternoon.    / It was snowing    / And it was going to snow.    / The blackbird sat    / In the cedar-limbs.