I
The other Cromwell, that strange muse of Wyatt
and master of last things: it makes a fine
edge-wisdom so near miswielding power.
I think of the headsman balancing that
extraordinary axe for a long instant
without breaking the skin; then the engine
cuts its ascending outline on the air,
wharrs its velocity, dreadful, perhaps
merciful. And that moment of spreading
wide the arms as a signal. In fact it’s all
signals. Pray, sirs, remember Cromwell’s trim
wit on the scaffold, that saved Wyatt’s neck;
the one blubbing-talk of the quyete mind! —
the other a scoundrel, yet this redeems him.
II
Imagine Hercules mated with the Hydra,
this king of bloody trunks their monster child.
More would have so rated him the arch
cleaver of women and old holy men.
Cerebral incest, his sperm a witch broth.
And Surrey, with his hierarchy of verse.
Meticulous the apportioning of time
in its reserve, Virgilian rectitude,
as though a full pavane of the elect
were the ten syllables to which they trod
as to the noblest music in the land,
lovely fecundity of barren heath,
Hillarby Bay, the Alde’s thin-ribboned course;
sudden clouds harrowing the Anglian sky.
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