(Does the husband tax the Congo for the monkey’s keep?)
The hopping monkey cannot follow the poodle dashing ahead.
Everyone holds his heart within his hands:
A prayer, a pledge of grace or gratitude
A devout offering to the god of summer, Sunday and plenitude.
The Sunday people are looking at hope itself.
They are looking at hope itself, under the sun, free from the teething anxiety, the gnawing nervousness
Which wastes so many days and years of consciousness.
The one who beholds them, beholding the gold and green
Of summer’s Sunday is himself unseen. This is because he is
Dedicated radiance, supreme concentration, fanatically threading
The beads, needles and eyes — at once! — of vividness and permanence.
He is a saint of Sunday in the open air, a fanatic disciplined
By passion, courage, passion, skill, compassion, love: the love of life and the love of light as one, under the sun, with the love of life.
Everywhere radiance glows like a garden in stillness blossoming.
Many are looking, many are holding something or someone
Little or big: some hold several kinds of parasols:
Each one who holds an umbrella holds it differently
One hunches under his red umbrella as if he hid
And looked forth at the river secretly, or sought to be
Free of all of the others’ judgement and proximity.
Next to him sits a lady who has turned to stone, or become a boulder,
Although her bell-and-sash hat is red.
A little girl holds to her mother’s arm
As if it were a permanent genuine certainty:
Her broad-brimmed hat is blue and white, blue like the river, like the sailboats white,
And her face and her look have all the bland innocence,
Open and far from fear as cherubims playing harpsichords.
An adolescent girl holds a bouquet of flowers
As if she gazed and sought her unknown, hoped-for, dreaded destiny.
No hold is as strong as the strength with which the trees,
Grip the ground, curve up to the light, abide in the warm kind air:
Rooted and rising with a perfected tenacity
Beyond the distracted erratic case of mankind there.
Every umbrella curves and becomes a tree,
And the trees curving, arise to become and be
Like the umbrella, the bells of Sunday, summer, and Sunday’s luxury.
Assured as the trees is the strolling dignity
Of the bourgeois wife who holds her husband’s arm
With the easy confidence and pride of one who is
— She is sure — a sovereign Victorian empress and queen.
Her husband’s dignity is as solid as his embonpoint:
He holds a good cigar, and a dainty cane, quite carelessly.
He is held by his wife, they are each other’s property,
Dressed quietly and impeccably, they are suave and grave
As if they were unaware or free of time, and the grave,
Master and mistress of Sunday’s promenade — of everything!
— As they are absolute monarchs of the ring-tailed monkey.
If you look long enough at anything
It will become extremely interesting;
If you look very long at anything
It will become rich, manifold, fascinating:
If you can look at any thing for long enough,
You will rejoice in the miracle of love,
You will possess and be blessed by the marvellous blinding radiance of love, you will be radiance.
Selfhood will possess and be possessed, as in the consecration of marriage, the mastery of vocation, the mystery of gift’s mastery, the deathless relation of parenthood and progeny.
All things are fixed in one direction: We move with the Sunday people from right to left.
The sun shines
In soft glory
Mankind finds
The famous story
Of peace and rest, released for a little while from the tides of weekday tiredness, the grinding anxiousness
Of daily weeklong lifelong fear and insecurity,
The profound nervousness which in the depths of consciousness
Gnaws at the roots of the teeth of being so continually, whether in sleep or wakefulness,
We are hardly aware that it is there or that we might ever be free
Of its ache and torment, free and open to all experience.
The Sunday summer sun shines equally and voluptuously
Upon the rich and the free, the comfortable, the rentier, the poor, and those who are paralyzed by poverty.
Seurat is at once painter, poet, architect, and alchemist:
The alchemist points his magical wand to describe and hold the Sunday’s gold,
Mixing his small alloys for long and long
Because he wants to hold the warm leisure and pleasure of the holiday
Within the fiery blaze and passionate patience of his gaze and mind
Now and forever: O happy, happy throng,
It is forever Sunday, summer, free: you are forever warm
Within his little seeds, his small black grains,
He builds and holds the power and the luxury
With which the summer Sunday serenely reigns.
— Is it possible? It is possible!—
Although it requires the labors of Hercules, Sisyphus, Flaubert, Roebling:
The brilliance and spontaneity of Mozart, the patience of a pyramid,
And requires all these of the painter who at twenty-five
Hardly suspects that in six years he will no longer be alive!
— His marvellous little marbles, beads, or molecules
Begin as points which the alchemy’s magic transforms
Into diamonds of blossoming radiance, possessing and blessing the visuaclass="underline"
For look how the sun shines anew and newly, transfixed
By his passionate obsession with serenity
As he transforms the sunlight into the substance of pewter, glittering, poised and grave, vivid as butter,
In glowing solidity, changeless, a gift, lifted to immortality.
The sunlight, the soaring trees and the Seine
Are as a great net in which Seurat seeks to seize and hold
All living being in a parade and promenade of mild, calm happiness:
The river, quivering, silver blue under the light’s variety,
Is almost motionless. Most of the Sunday people
Are like flowers, walking, moving toward the river, the sun, and the river of the sun.
Each one holds some thing or some one, some instrument
Holds, grasps, grips, clutches or somehow touches
Some form of being as if the hand and fist of holding and possessing,
Alone and privately and intimately, were the only genuine lock or bond of blessing.
A young man blows his flute, curved by pleasure’s musical activity,
His back turned upon the Seine, the sunlight, and the sunflower day.
A dapper dandy in a top hat gazes idly at the Seine:
The casual delicacy with which he holds his cane
Resembles his tailored elegance.
He sits with well-bred posture, sleek and pressed,
Fixed in his niche: he is his own mustache.
A working man slouches parallel to him, quite comfortable,
Lounging or lolling, leaning on his elbow, smoking a meerschaum,
Gazing in solitude, at ease and oblivious or contemptuous
Although he is very near the elegant young gentleman.
Behind him a black hound snuffles the green, blue ground.
Between them, a wife looks down upon
The knitting in her lap, as in profound
Scrutiny of a difficult book. For her constricted look
Is not in her almost hidden face, but in her holding hands
Which hold the knitted thing as no one holds