It will be over in just a few moments.
But I have one last thing to read to you.
A self-contained lyric from Sandover, called Samos.
The form here is interesting.
It's a form that Auden found among the lyrics of Dante.
It's like a tripled, or doubled, or squared sestina.
Five stanzas, 12 lines each, an envoy of five lines,
and only five end words throughout,
which recur at a fixed pattern.
Auden called it a canzone as did Dante,
but there are, of course, many different forms
under that definition in Dante's period.
The numbers 5 and 12 are rather crucial to the poem in ways
I won't need to explain, but that's
the reason I picked the form.
It describes a school break, an excursion
to the island of Samos.
And still, at sea or night, we had a sense of sunrise,
golden oil poured upon water, soothing its heave,
letting the sleeper sense what inborn amniotic homing
sense was ferrying him now through the dream
fire in which (it has been felt) each human sense burns, now
through ship's radar's cool sixth sense or mere unerring
starlight to an island.
Here we were.
The twins of sea and land up and about for hours.
Hues, cries, scents had placed at eye level
a single light croissant, the harbor
glazed with warm pink light.
Fire-wisps were weaving a string bag of light for sea stones.
Their astounding color sense.
Porphyry, alabaster, chrysolite translucences
that go dead in daylight asked only the quick dip
in holy water for the saint of cell on cell to come alight--
illuminated crystals thinking light, refracting it,
the gray prismatic fire or yellow-gray of sea's
dilute sapphire.
Wavelengths daily deeply score the leit-motifs
of loom and wheel upon this land.
To those who listen, it's the promised land.
A little spin today?
Dirt roads inland jounce and revolve
in a nerve-jangling light, doing the ancient dances of the land
where gnarled as olive trees that
shag the land with silver, old men--
their two-bladed sense of spendthrift poverty
the very land.
Being, if not loaf, tomb--
superbly land-- upright on the downbeat.
We who water the local wine, which drinks itself
like water, clap for more, cry out
to be this island licked all over by a white, salt fire,
be noon's pulsing ember raked by fire
know nothing now but Earth, air, water, fire.
For once out of the frying pan to land
within their timeless, everlasting fire.
Blood's least red monocle, o magnifier
of the great eye that sees by its own light
more pictures in the world's enchanted fire
than come and go in any shrewd crossfire upon the page
of syllable and sense.
We want unwilled excursions and ascents,
crave the upward-rippling rungs of fire.
The outward-rippling rings-- enough--
of water.
Now some details, how else will this hold water?
Our room's three flights above the whitewashed waterfront
where Pythagoras was born.
A fire escape of sky-blue iron leads down to water.
Yachts creak on mirror berths, and overwater voices
from Sweden or Somalialand tell how this or that one
crossed the water to Ephesus, came back
with toilet water and a two kilo box of Turkish delight--
trifles.
Yet they shine with such pure light in memory, even they,
that the eyes water.
As with the setting sun or innocence,
do things that fade especially make sense?
Samos.
We keep trying to make sense of what we can.
Not souls of the first water--
although we've put on airs and taken fire--
we shall be dust of quite another land
before the seeds here planted come to light.
[APPLAUSE]