Part 4

And all that day, another day: Thin husks I had known as men, Dry casques of departed locusts speaking a shell of speech ... Propped between chairs and table ... Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being, A dryness calling for death. Another day, between walls of a sham Mycenian, “Toc” sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns, And beneath the jazz a cortex, a stiffness or stillness; The older shell, varnished to lemon colour, Brown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster, Dry professorial talk ... now stilling the ill beat music, House expulsed by this house, but not extinguished. Square even shoulders and the satin skin, Gone cheeks of the dancing woman, Still the old dead dry talk, gassed out It is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass, A petrification of air. The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself. The young men, never! Only the husk of talk. O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, Dido choked up with sobs for her Sicheus Lies heavy in my arms, dead weight Drowning with tears, new Eros, And the life goes on, mooning upon bare hills; Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless, Yet drinks the thirst from our lips, solid as echo, Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blurr; But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears For dead Sicheus. Life to make mock of motion: For the husks, before me, move, The words rattle: shells given out by shells.

The live man, out of lands and prisons, shakes the dry pods, Probes for old wills and friendships, and the big locust-casques Bend to the tawdry table, Lift up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets, And make sound like the sound of voices. Lorenzaccio Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices. Ma si morisse! Credesse caduto da se, ma si morisse. And the tall indifference moves, a more living shell, Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact, O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher, Eternal watcher of things, Of things, of men, of passions. Eyes floating in dry, dark air; E biondo, with glass-gray iris, with an even side-fall of hair The stiff, still features.