Hymn to Intellectual Beauty


You come home.  The usual
despair has made you
a child again, and your boss,
or whatever authority,
the parent-teacher-bully
you hate and love.
So that this latter end
of life resembles the first:
an adventure, though to no good end,
a vastness, without comfort.
Which contains comfortable things:
a worn armchair,
the television, your pride
that the latter is not always on
in your house, unlike those
of inferiors.  And with evening
you almost switch it on
but something stops you.  Perhaps a
piled, suddenly toppling
disdain: for the detectives,
their limited triumphs, the doctors,
their questionable loves,
the demagogues who read and are the news.
Yet those are absences;
what keeps you from them
is, however obscure,
a presence.  Likewise you haven’t
sought your computer.  Though you
accept its promise
of extending something like yourself
across something like
the universe, tonight
somehow you reject
the premise: Why should the self
be extended?  Why should it want to be?
What is it that sits here
drinking and then not even that,
and turning on a light to read,
until the griefs of families,
the lonely and perverse, the young
and old, epiphany itself,
or facts before which you are helpless,
are all found helpless to attract you?
But now you rebel, or not
you but the medium
in which you move: Who is this “you”
that invokes and ignores me?  I, I,
I am satisfied, happy,
maybe a little tired,
coming down with something … Neverthe-
less you sit,
feeling sorry for yourself:
a default position
which tonight deepens.  Lost
loves of which
you imagine, still,
you were capable, lost selves, and
the major product of the medium
in which you move: lost time,
become facets of a landscape
where there are few things
yet where each seems to exist
essentially.  You regard them,
then turn
your back on them and drift
towards an afterlife where
they again appear, all the
failed hypotheses.  But here
you can talk to them, mildly,
without shame or
regret.  (The largest
and most futile rumbles
from a sort of sky, as muddled as
a train announcement.)  Till again you’re bored,
with this strange,
higher, *interested boredom,
under the one
lit lamp, in your old
vulgar armchair.  And walk
away from death too,
as if outer vastness
were earthly vastness, the stars lights
on that plain, yourself looming large
on that plain, happiness likely beyond
the waste, and your gaze, seeking it out,
*the awful shadow of some unseen power*.