Sonnets of the Blood (I-IX)

What is the flesh and blood compounded of

But a few moments in the life of time?

This prowling of the cells, litigious love,

Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.

Consider the first settlers of our bone,

Observe how busily they sued the dust,

Estopped forever by the last dusted stone.

It is a pity that two brothers must

Perceive a canker of perennial flower

To make them brothers in mortality:

Perfect this treason to the murderous hour

If you would win the hard identity

Of brothers—a long race for men to run

Nor quite achieved when the perfection’s won.

Near to me as perfection in the blood

And more mysterious far, is this, my brother:

A light vaulted into your solitude.

It studied burns lest you its rage should smother.

It is a flame obscure to any eyes,

Most like the fire that warms the deepest grave

(The cold grave is the deepest of our lies)

To which our blood is the indentured slave:

The fire that burns most secretly in you

Does not expend you hidden and alone,

The studious fire consumes not one, but two—

Me also, marrowing the self-same bone.

Our property in fire is death in life

Flawing the rocky fundament with strife.

III

Then, brother, you would never think me vain

Or rude, if I should mention dignity;

Think little of it. Dignity’s the stain

Of mortal sin that knows humility.

Let me design the hour when you were born

Since, if that’s vain, it’s only childlike so:

Like an attempting frost on April corn

Considerate death would hardly let you go.

Reckon the cost—if you would validate

Once more our slavery to circumstance

Not by contempt of a prescriptive fate

But in your bearing towards an hour of chance.

It is a part so humble and so proud

You’ll think but little of it in your shroud.

The times have changed. Why do you make a fuss

For privilege when there’s no law of form?

Who of our kin was pusillanimous,

A fine bull galloping into a storm?

Why, none; unless you count it arrogance

To cultivate humility in pride,

To look but casually and half-askance

On boots and spurs that went a devil’s ride.

There was, remember, a Virginian

Who took himself to be brute nature’s law,

Cared little what men thought him, a tall man

Who meditated calmly what he saw

Until he freed his Negroes, lest he be

Too strict with nature and than they less free.

Our elder brother whom we had not seen

These twenty years until you brought him back

From the cyclonic West, where he had been

Sent by the shaking fury in the track

We know so well, wound in these arteries:

You, other brother, I have become strange

To you, and you must study ways to seize

Mortality, that knows how to derange

Corpuscles for designs that it may choose;

Your blood is altered by the sudden death

Of one who of all persons could not use

Life half so well as death. Let’s look beneath

That life. Perhaps hers only is our rest—

To study this, all lifetime may be best.

The fire I praise was once perduring flame—

Till it snuffs with our generation out;

No matter, it’s all one, it’s but a name

Not as late honeysuckle half so stout;

So think upon it how the fire burns blue,

Its hottest, when the flame is all but spent;

Thank God the fuel is low, we’ll not renew

That length of flame into our firmament;

Think too the rooftree crackles and will fall

On us, who saw the sacred fury’s height—

Seated in her tall chair, with the black shawl

From head to foot, burning with motherly light

More spectral than November dusk could mix

With sunset, to blaze on her pale crucifix.

VII

This message hastens lest we both go down

Scattered, with no character, to death;

Death is untutored, with an ignorant frown

For precious identities of breath.

But you perhaps will say confusion stood,

A vulture, near the heart of all our kin:

I’ve heard the echoes in a dark tangled wood

Yet never saw I a face peering within.

These evils being anonymities,

We fulminate, in exile from the earth,

Aged exclusions of blood memories—

Those superstitions of explosive birth;

Until there’ll be of us not anything

But foolish death, who is confusion’s king.

VIII

Not power nor the casual hand of God

Shall keep us whole in our dissevering air,

It is a stink upon this pleasant sod

So foul, the hovering buzzard sees it fair;

I ask you will it end therefore tonight

And the moth tease again the windy flame,

Or spiders, eating their loves, hide in the night

At last, drowsy with self-devouring shame?

Call it the house of Atreus where we live—

Which one of us the Greek perplexed with crime

Questions the future: bring that lucid sieve

To strain the appointed particles of time!

Whether by Corinth or by Thebes we go

The way is brief, but the fixed doom, not so.

Captains of industry, your aimless power

Awakens harsh velleities of time:

Let you, brother, captaining your hour

Be zealous that your numbers are all prime,

Lest false division with sly mathematic

Plunder the inner mansion of the blood,

The Thracian, swollen with pride, besiege the Attic—

Invader foraging the sacred wood:

Yet the prime secret whose simplicity

Your towering engine hammers to reduce,

Though driven, holds that bulwark of the sea

Which breached will turn unspeaking fury loose

To drown out him who swears to rectify

Infinity, that has nor ear nor eye.

Copyright Credit: Allen Tate, “Sonnets of the Blood (I-IX)” from The Collected Poems 1919-1976. Copyright © 1960, 1965 by Allen Tate. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

Source: Selected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1932)