Spring and All by C. D. Wright, William Carlos Williams Read Free Book Online

between the rigidities of vulgar experience and the imagination is rare. It is new, immediate — It is so because it is actual, always real. It is experience dynamized into reality.
    Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself — sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity.
    Pio Baroja interested me once —
    Baroja leaving the medical profession, some not important inspectors work in the north of Spain, opened a bakery in Madrid.
    The isolation he speaks of, as a member of the so called intellectual class, influenced him to abandon his position and engage himself, as far as possible, in the intricacies of the design patterned by the social class — He sees no interest in isolation —
    These gestures are the effort for self preservation or the preservation of some quality held in high esteem —
    Here it seems to be that a man, starved in imagination, changes his milieu so that his food may be richer — The social class, without the power of expression, lives upon imaginative values.
    I mean only to emphasize the split that goes down through the abstractions of art to the everyday exercises of the most primitive types —
    there is a sharp division — the energizing force of imagination on one side — and the acquisitive — PROGRESSIVE force of the lump on the other
    The social class with its religion, its faith, sincerity and all the other imaginative values is positive (yes)
    the merchant, hibernating, unmagnatized — tends to drop away into the isolate, inactive particles — Religion is continued then as a form, art as a convention —
    To the social, energized class — ebullient now in Russia the particles adhere because of the force of the imagination energizing them —
    Anyhow the change of Baroja interested me
    Among artists, or as they are sometimes called “men of imagination” “creators”, etc. this force is recognized in a pure state — All this can be used to show the relationships between genius, hand labor, religion — etc. and the lack of feeling between artists and the middle class type —
    The jump between fact and the imaginative reality
    The study of all human activity is the deliniation of the cresence and ebb of this force, shifting fromclass to class and location to location — rhythm: the wave rhythm of Shakespeare watching clowns and kings sliding into nothing
    XIX
    This is the time of year
    when boys fifteen and seventeen
    wear two horned lilac blossoms
    in their caps — or over one ear
    What is it that does this?
    It is a certain sort —
    drivers for grocers or taxidrivers
    white and colored —
    fellows that let their hair grow long
    in a curve over one eye —
    Horned purple
    Dirty satyrs, it is
    vulgarity raised to the last power
    They have stolen them
    broken the bushes apart
    with a curse for the owner —
    Lilacs —
    They stand in the doorways
    on the business streets with a sneer
    on their faces
    adorned with blossoms
    Out of their sweet heads
    dark kisses — rough faces
    XX
    The sea that encloses her young body
    ula lu la lu
    is the sea of many arms —
    The blazing secrecy of noon is undone
    and and and
    the broken sand is the sound of love —
    The flesh is firm that turns in the sea
    O la la
    the sea that is cold with dead mens’ tears —
    Deeply the wooing that penetrated
    to the edge of the sea
    returns in the plash of the waves —
    a wink over the shoulder
    large as the ocean —
    with wave following wave to the edge
    coom barrooom —
    It is the cold of the sea
    broken upon the sand by the force
    of the moon —
    In the sea the young flesh playing
    floats with the cries of far off men
    who rise in the sea
    with green arms
    to homage again the fields over there
    where the night is deep —
    la lu la lu
    but lips too few
    assume the new — marrruu
    Underneath the sea where it is dark
    there is no edge
    so two —
    XXI
    one day in Paradise
    a