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Allen Tate - False Nightmare
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"I give the yawp barbaric
Of piety and pelf
(Who now reads Herrick?)

"And contradict myself
No matter, the verse is large.
My five-and-ten cent shelf

"The continent is: my targe
Bigger than Greece. The shock
Of Me exceeds its marge

"Myself the old cock
With wind and water wild
(Hell with the privy lock):

"I have no woman child;
Onan-Amurikee
My son, alone, beguiled

"By my complacency
In priggery to slay
My blind posterity . . ."

-These words, at dawn of day
In the sleep-awakened mind,
I made Walt Whitman say:

Wherefore I and my kind
Wear meekly in the face
A pale honeydew rind

Of rotten-sweet grace;
Ungracefully doating
Great-aunts hanged in lace

We are: mildly gloating
Dog bones in a trunk
Saved in the attic. . . .

                      Floating
Hating king and monk,
The classes and the mass,
We chartered an old junk

(Like Jesus on his ass)
Unto the smutty corn
And smirking sassafras.

In bulled Europa`s morn
We love our land because
All night we raped her-torn,

Blue grass and glade. Jackdaws,
Buzzards and crows the land
Love with prurient claws;

So may I cunning my hand
To clip the increment
From the land or quicksand;

For unto us God sent
To gloze with iron bonds
The dozing continent-

The fallow graves, ponds
Full of limp fish, tall
Terrains, fields and fronds
Through which we crawl, and call.
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