FROM THE HYMN ON THE ECLIPSE, 1955 (First Movement)
Tick, tick. Though the morning is late
Tick, tick. Time does neither love nor hate.
Time tells thin and thick
Though the weather cleave the dumb and deaf,
Stones stray from life to death.
Famine and bounty, faded or bonded
In the dancing g dust or in the sheltered sheaf,
Time tells thin and thick
Though seconds set before the breath,
Minutes middle with human milk,
And hours house the hands that help
Resolve the tick, tick, tick
Of the motion and the moment
Only the spider weaves on an epitaph,
When weeds wedlock with weed,
Clay closes communion with clay,
No motion but the mud it rakes
No moment but the memory it meets
Mud and memory are medium
Like exit and entry through a gate
Of a foam, feather, or a fate.
And only time has strains but stays
On its own opinion, oath and office
Asking no opinion from the others
If to quicken or to lag. Itself its origin.
The kitchen sink the amorous amen at
The chalk chapel, the anthem at
The garden where sweet sweetens
From juice to jam, the anonymous at
Martyrdom mentioned motely at the mass.
The arbiter and the approach at
The margin of mistake and the marriage of mind,
The after-ardor of bed and breakfast-time
To roll the wrinkle out, round the wreck about
The first baptized at the first finding
How it can play the pantomime
With the tick, tick, tick
Of its innocent imitative trick
The found, the possessed, the lost,
The ooze last night, the matter of today
Shall neither prime nor pause
Time is a trinity, is a trinity
Tick on. Tick in. One, two, three.
From the shore-shorn shell
Of wombs where unborn kindreds kick,
To the booming baptismal bell
Of tiny tongues on the salt they lick.
Then the merry and the sick,
The high-heel and the walking stick
Find their careers correct
So faint and then so loud
In swaddling and in shroud—
No everlasting middleground
Time for loss and time for gain.
Descends—an incandescent bird
Gathering flocks of different feather
And schools of different scale.
The agony at faring farther
Always ticking, ticking next
Seasons on a single track.
Now, now the meeting on the plane—
Time for loss and time for gain.
What time is it? What time is it?
When do time and no time meet?
Then. Now. And ever. You shall neither rise nor sink
In time. Time is only what you think.
Then. Now. And ever. Tick on. Tick in.
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