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Allen Tate - Ode To Our Young Pro-Consuls Of The AirAllen Tate - Ode To Our Young Pro-Consuls Of The Air
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To St. John Perse Once more the country calls From sleep, as from his doom, Each citizen to take His modest stake Where the sky falls With a Pacific boom. Warm winds in even climes Push southward angry bees As we, with tank and plane, Wrest land and main From yellow mimes, The puny Japanese. Boys hide in lunging cubes Crouching to explode, Beyond Atlantic skies, With cheerful cries Their barking tubes Upon the German toad. Marvelling day by day Upon the human kind What might I have (A poet alone) To balk or slay These enemies of mind? I sought by night to foal Chimeras into men- Decadence of power That, at late hour, Untimed the soul To live the past again: Toy sword, three-cornered hat At York and Lexington- While Bon-Homme whipped at sea This enemy Whose roar went flat After George made him run; Toy rifle, leather hat Above the boyish beard And in that Blue renown The Gray went down, Down like a rat, And even the rats cheered. In a much later age (Europe had been in flames) Proud Wilson yielded ground To franc and pound, Made pilgrimage In the wake of Henry James. Where Lou Quatorze held fete For sixty thousand men, France took the German sword But later, bored, Opened the gate To Hitler at Compiegne. In this bad time no part The poet took, nor chance: He studied Swift and Donne, Ignored the Hun, While with faint heart Proust caused the fall of France. Sad day at Oahu When the Jap beetle hitl Our Proustian retort Was Kimmel and Short, Old women in blue, And then the beetle bit. It was defeat, or near itl Yet all that feeble time Brave Brooks and lithe MacLeish Had sworn to thresh Our flagging spirit With literature made Prime! Cow Creek and bright Bear Wallow, Nursing the blague that dulls Spirits grown Eliotic, Now patriotic Are: we follow The Irresponsibles! Young men, Americans! You go to win the world With zeal pro-consular For our whole star You partisans Of liberty unfurled! O animal excellence, Take pterodactyl flight Fire-winged into the air And find your lair With cunning sense On some Arabian bight Or sleep your dreamless sleep (Reptilian bomber!) by The Mediterranean And like a man Swear you to keep Faith with imperial eye: Take off, O gentle youth, And coasting India Scale crusty Everest Whose mythic crest Resists your truth; And spying far away Upon the Tibetan plain A limping caravan, Dive, and exterminate The Lama, late Survival of old pain. Go kill the dying swan.
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