Retroduction to American History

By Allen Tate 1899–1979 Allen Tate

Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,

The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness; sleep

Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers,

The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway.

What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep

Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch

Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf

Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves.

And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees

Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy

To the backs of obsessions.

Winter like spring no less

Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets innocently

The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre impudence.

In such serenity of equal fates, why has Narcissus

Urged the brook with questions? Merged with the element

Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to tickle

The cow’s gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain.

Antiquity breached mortality with myths.

Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates

A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary

Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon

In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now

(The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth

“Hitting on all thirty-two;” scholarship pares

The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores

His “passionate underwear;” morality disciplines the other

Person; every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rousseau;

Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated universities, three

Thousand dollars a year. Simplicity, Flamineo, is obscene;

Sunlight topples indignant from the hill.

In every railroad station everywhere every lover

Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke

Thickens. Ticket in hand, he pumps his body

Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,

His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth

Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or spiders

Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are dead.

More sanitation is enough, enough remains: dreams

Do not end—lucidities beyond the stint of thought.

For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain;

A corpse is your bedfellow, your great-grandfather dines

With you this evening on a cavalry horse. Intellect

Connives with heredity, creates fate as Euclid geometry

By definition:

The sunlit bones in your house

Are immortal in the titmouse,

They trip the feet of grandma

Like an afterthought each day.

These unseen sunlit bones,

They may be in the cat

That startles them in grandma

But look at this or that

They meet you every way.

For Pelops’ and Tantalus’ successions were at once simpler,

If perplexed, and less subtle than you think. Heredity

Proposes love, love exacts language, and we lack

Language. When shall we speak again? When shall

The sparrow dusting the gutter sing? When shall

This drift with silence meet the sun? When shall I wake?

Allen Tate, “Retroduction to American History” from The Collected Poems 1919-1976. Copyright © 1960, 1965 by Allen Tate. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

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

Biography

Allen Tate was a well-known man of letters from the American South, a central figure in the fields of poetry, criticism, and ideas. In the course of a career spanning the middle decades of the twentieth century, Tate authored poems, essays, translations, and fiction. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor James T. Jones wrote that his "influence was prodigious, his circle of acquaintances immense." Tate relished his "man . . .

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