TUSCAN cypresses,
What is
it?
Folded in like a dark
thought
For which
the language is lost,
Tuscan cypresses,
Is there a great secret?
Are our words no
good?
The undeliverable
secret,
Dead with a
dead race and a dead speech, and yet
Darkly monumental in you,
Etruscan
cypresses.
Ah, how I admire your
fidelity,
Dark
cypresses,
Is it the secret of the long-nosed
Etruscans?
The
long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling
Etruscans,
Who made
so little noise outside the cypress
groves?
Among the sinuous, flame-tall
cypresses
That
swayed their length of darkness all around
Etruscan-dusky, wavering men of
old Etruria:
Naked
except for fanciful long shoes,
Going with insidious, half-smiling
quietness
And some
of Africa’s imperturbable sang-froid
About a forgotten
business.
What business, then?
Nay, tongues are dead, and
words are hollow as hollow
seed-pods,
Having shed their sound and
finished all their echoing
Etruscan syllables,
That had the telling.
Yet more I see you darkly
concentrate,
Tuscan
cypresses,
On one
old thought:
On one
old slim imperishable thought, while you remain
Etruscan cypresses;
Dusky, slim marrow-thought of
slender, flickering men of
Etruria,
Whom Rome called
vicious.
Vicious, dark cypresses:
Vicious, you supple, brooding,
softly-swaying pillars of dark
flame.
Monumental to a dead, dead
race
Embalmed in
you!
Were they then vicious, the slender,
tender-footed,
Long-nosed men of Etruria?
Or was their way only evasive and different,
dark, like cypress —
trees in a wind?
They are dead, with all their
vices,
And all that
is left
Is the
shadowy monomania of some cypresses
And tombs.
The smile, the subtle Etruscan smile
still lurking
Within
the tombs,
Etruscan
cypresses.
He laughs
longest who laughs last;
Nay, Leonardo only bungled the pure Etruscan
smile.
What would I not give
To bring back the rare and
orchid-like
Evil-yclept Etruscan?
For as to the evil
We have only Roman word for
it,
Which I, being a
little weary of Roman virtue,
Don’t hang much weight
on.
For oh, I know, in the dust where we
have buried
The
silenced races and all their abominations,
We have buried so much of the
delicate magic of life.
There in the deeps
That churn the frankincense and
ooze the myrrh,
Cypress shadowy,
Such an aroma of lost human life!
They say the fit
survive,
But I
invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly
lost.
To bring their
meaning back into life again.
Which they have taken away
And wrapt inviolable in soft
cypress-trees,
Etruscan cypresses.
Evil, what is evil?
There is only one evil, to deny
life
As Rome denied
Etruria
And
mechanical America Montezuma still.
Fiesole.