And Neufchastel and Neauphal and Vexis;
And two years war, and never two years go by
but come new forays, and "The wheel
"Turns, Conrad, turns, and in the end toward ill."
And Richard and Alix span the gap, Gisors,
And Eleanor and Richard face the King,
For the fourth family time Plantagenet
Faces his dam and whelps, . . . and holds Gisors,
Now Alix' dowry, against Philippe-Auguste
(Louis' by Adelaide, wood-lost, then crowned at Etampe)
And never two years sans war.

And Zion still
Bleating away to Eastward, the lost lamb,
Damned city (was only Frederic knew
The true worth, and patched with Malek Kamel
The sane and sensible peace to bait the world
And set all camps disgruntled with all leaders.
"Damn'd atheists!" alike Mahomet growls,
And Christ grutches more sullen for Sicilian sense
Than does Mahound on Malek.)

The bright coat
Is more to the era, and in Messina's beach-way
Des Barres and Richard split the reed-lances
And the coat is torn.

(Moving in heavy air: Henry and Saladin.
The serpent coils in the crowd.)

The letters run: Tancred to Richard:

That the French King is
More against thee, than is his will to me
Good and in faith; and moves against your safety.

Richard to Tancred:

That our pact stands firm,
And, for these slanders, that I think you lie.

Proofs, and in writing:

And if Bourgogne say they were not
Deliver'd by hand and his,
Let him move sword against me and my word.

Richard to Philip: silence, with a tone.

Richard to Flanders: the subjoined and precedent.

Philip a silence; and then, "Lies and turned lies
"For that he will fail Alix

"Affianced, and Sister to Ourself."

Ci

Alix, sister of
Philippe-
Auguste

Frederic II
and Malek
Kamel

50

57

24

C

That knew us, found us again on the turn of it,
Knocking at empty rooms, seeking for buried beauty;
And the sun-tanned, gracious and well-formed fingers
Lift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire handle
Twists for the knocker's fall; no voice to answer.
A strange concierge, in place of the gouty-footed.
Sceptic against all this one seeks the living,
Stubborn against the fact. The wilted flowers
Brushed out a seven year since, of no effect.
Damn the partition! Paper, dark brown and stretched,
Flimsy and damned partition.

Ione, dead the long year,
My lintel, and Liu Ch'e's lintel.
Time blacked out with the rubber.

The Elysée carries a name on
And the bus behind me gives me a date for peg;
Low ceiling and the Erard and the silver,
These are in "time." Four chairs, the bow-front dresser,
The panier of the desk, cloth top sunk in.

"Beer-bottle on the statue's pediment!
" That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past,
" Contemporary." And the passion endures.
Against their action, aromas. Rooms, against chronicles.
Smaragdos, chrysolitos; De Gama wore striped pants in Africa
And "Mountains of the sea gave birth to troops";

Camoëns

Le vieux commode en acajou:
beer-bottles of various strata,
But *is* she dead as Tyro? In seven years?

Έλινας, ίλαυδρος ίλιπτολις
The sea runs in the beach-groove, shaking the floated pebbles,
Eleanor!

The scarlet curtain throws a less scarlet shadow;

Arnaut

Lamplight at Buovilla, e quel remir,
And all that day
Nicae moved before me
And the cold grey air troubled her not
For all her naked beauty, bit not the tropic skin,
And the long slender feet lit on the curb's marge
And her moving height went before me,
We alone having being.
And all that day, another day:
Thin husks I had known as men,
Dry casques of departed locusts
speaking a shell of speech . . .

25

c/f

Propped between chairs and table . . .
Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being;

A dryness calling for death;

Another day, between walls of a sham Mycenian,
Tooe* sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns,
And beneath the jazz a cortex, a stiffness or stillness,
The older shell, varnished to lemon colour,
Brown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster,
Dry professorial talk . . .
now stilling the ill beat music,
House expulsed by this house, but not extinguished.

Square even shoulders and the satin skin,
Gone cheeks of the dancing woman,
Still the old dead dry talk, gassed out—
It is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass,
A petrification of air.
The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself;
The young men, never!
Only the husk of talk.
O voi che siete in piccoloetta barca,
Dido choked up with sobs for her Sicheus
Lies heavy in my arms, dead weight
Drowning, with tears, new Eros,

And the life goes on, mooning upon bare hills;
Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,
Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,
solid as echo,
Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blur;
But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears
For dead Sicheus.

Life to make mock of motion:
For the husks, before me, move,
The words rattle: shells given out by shells.

The live man, out of lands and prisons,
shakes the dry pods,
Probes for old wills and friendships, and the big locust-casques
Bend to the tawdry table,
Lift up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets,
And make sound like the sound of voices.
Lorenzaccio
Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices.

22

26 Ma si morisse!

Credesse caduto da se, ma si morisse.
And the tall indifference moves,
a more living shell,

Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact.

O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher,
Eternal watcher of things,

Of things, of men, of passions.

Eyes floating in dry, dark air,

E biondo, with glass-grey iris, with an even side-fall of hair
The stiff, still features.

THE
EIGHTH
CANTO

HESE fragments you have shelved
(shored).

“Slut!” “Bitch!” Truth and Calliope

Slanging each other sous les lauriers:
That Alessandro was negroid. And
Malatesta

Sigismund:

Frater tamquam

Et compater carissime: tergo

...hanni de

...dicis

...entia

Equivalent to:

Giohanni of the Medici,
Florence.

Letter received, and in the matter of
our Messire Gianozio,

One from him also, sent on in form and with all due dispatch,
Having added your wishes and memoranda.

As to arranging peace between you and the King of Ragona,

So far as I am concerned, it wd. give me the greatest possible pleasure,

At any rate nothing wd. give me more pleasure

or be more acceptable to me,

And I shd. like to be party to it, as was promised me,
either as participant or adherent.

As for my service money, perhaps you and your father wd. draw it

And send it on to me as quickly as possible.

And tell the Maestro di pentore

That there can be no question of his painting the walls for the moment,
As the mortar is not yet dry

And it wd. be merely work chucked away

(buttato via)

But I want it to be quite clear, that until the chapels are ready

I will arrange for him to paint something else

So that both he and I shall get as much enjoyment as possible from it,

And in order that he may enter my service

And also because you write me that he needs cash,

I want to arrange with him to give him so much per year

And to assure him that he will get the sum agreed on.

Piero della
Francesca

Petrus de
Burgo

28

> You may say that I will deposit security for him wherever he likes.
> And let me have a clear answer,
> For I mean to give him good treatment
> So that he may come to live the rest of his life in my lands—
> Unless you put him off it—
> And for this I mean to make due provision,
> So that he can work as he likes,
> Or waste his time as he likes

*(affatigandose per suo piacere o no
non gli manchera la proviazione mai)

never lacking provision.

SIGISMINDUS PANDOLPHUS DE MALATESTIS,
In Campo Illus, Domini Venetorum die 7
aprili 1449, contra Cremonam.

and because the aforesaid most illustrious

**Francesco Sforza**

Duke of Milan

Is content and wills that the aforesaid Lord Sigismundo Go into the service of the most magnificent commune of the Florentines For alliance defensive of the two states, Therefore between the the aforesaid Illustrious Sigismund And the respectable man Agnola della Stufa, ambassador, sindic and procurator Appointed by the ten of the baily, etc., the half Of these 50,000 florins, free of attainder, For 1400 cavalry and four hundred foot To come into the terrene of the commune or elsewhere in Tuscany As please the ten of the Baily, And to be himself there with them in the service of the commune With his horsemen and his footmen

*(gente di cavallo e da pie), etc.
Aug. 5, 1452, register of the Ten of the Baily.*

Pennabilli

From the forked rocks of Penna and Billi, on Carpegna with the road leading under the cliff,

in the wind-shelter into Tuscany,

And the north road, toward the Mørechia the mud-stretch full of cobbles.

Lyra:

"Ye spirits who of olde were in this land
Each under Love, and shaken,
Go with your lutes, awaken
The summer within her mind,
Who hath not Helen for peer

Yseut nor Batsabe."

With the interruption:

*Magnifico, compater et carissimo*
*(Johanni di Cosimo)*

Venice has taken me on again
At 7,000 a month, *forini di Camera*.
For 2,000 horse and four hundred footmen,
And it rains here by the gallon,
We have had to dig a new ditch.
In three or four days
I shall try to set up the bombards.

Under the plumes, with the flakes and small wads of colour
Showering from the balconies,
With the sheets spread from windows,
with leaves and small branches pinned on them,
Arras hung from the railings; out of the dust,
With pheasant tails upright on their forelocks,

The small white horses, the
Twelve girls riding in order, green satin in pannier'd habits;
Under the baldachino, silver'd with heavy stitches,
Bianca Visconti, with Sforza,
The peasant's son and the duchess,
To Rimini, and to the wars southward,
Boats drawn on the sand, red-orange sails in the creek's mouth,
For two days' pleasure, mostly 'la pesca,' fishing,
Di cui in the which he, Francesco, *godeva molto*.
To the war southward

In which he, at that time, received an excellent hiding.
And the Greek emperor was in Florence

*(Ferrara having the pest)*

And with him Gemisthus Plethon
Talking of the war about the temple at Delphos,
And of POSEIDON, *concret Allgemeine*,
And telling of how Plato went to Dionysius of Syracuse
Because he had observed that tyrants
Were most efficient in all that they set their hands to,
But he was unable to persuade Dionysius
To any amelioration.

And in the gate at Ancona, between the foregate and the main-gates
Sigismundo, ally, come through an enemy force,
To patch up some sort of treaty, passes one gate
And they shut it before they open the next gate, and he says:
"Now you have me,
Caught like a hen in a coop."

Di

29

Gemisto
Plethon

30 And the captain of the watch says: "Yes Messire Sigismundo,
But we want this town for ourselves."

Alfonso of
Naples

With the church against him,
-With the Medici bank for itself,
With wattle Sforza against him,
Sforza Francesco, wattle-nose,
Who married him (Sigismundo) his (Francesco's)
Daughter in September,
Who stole Pèsaro in October (as Broglio says "bestialmente"),
Who stood with the Venetians in November,
With the Milanese in December,
Sold Milan in November, stole Milan in December
Or something of that sort,
Commanded the Milanese in the spring, the Venetians at midsummer,
The Milanese in the autumn,
And was Naples' ally in October,
He, Sigismundo, templum ædificavit
In Romagna, teeming with cattle thieves,
with the game lost in mid-channel,
And never quite lost till '50,
and never quite lost till the end, in Romagna,
So that Galeaz sold Pèsaro "to get pay for his cattle."

And Poictiers, you know, Guillaume Poictiers,
had brought the song up out of Spain
With the singers and viels. But here they wanted a setting,
By Marecchia, where the water comes down over the cobbles
And Mastin had come to Verucchio,
and the sword, Paulo il Bello's
caught in the arras
And, in Este's house, Parisina
Paid
For this tribe paid always, and the house
Called also Atreides',
And the wind is still for a little
And the dusk rolled
to one side a little
And he was twelve at the time, Sigismundo,
And no dues had been paid for three years,
And his elder brother gone pious;
And that year they fought in the streets,
And that year he got out to Cesena
And brought back the levies,
And that year he crossed by night over the Foglia, and ...

THE NINTH CANTO

NE year floods rose,
One year they fought in the snows,
One year hail fell, breaking the trees and walls.
Down here in the marsh they trapped him
in one year,
And he stood in the water up to his neck
to keep the hounds off him,
And he floundered about in the marsh
and came in after three days,
That was Astorre Manfredi of Faenza
who worked the ambush
and set the dogs off to find him,
In the marsh, down here under Mantua,
And he fought in Fano, in a street fight,
and that was nearly the end of him;

And the Emperor came down and knighted us,
And they had a wooden castle set up for fiesta,
And one year Bassinio went out into the courtyard
Where the lists were, and the palisades
had been set for the tourneys,
And he talked down the anti-Hellene,
And there was an heir male to the seignor,
And Madame Genevra died.
And he, Sigismundo, was Capitan for the Venetians.
And he had sold off small castles
and built the great Rocca to his plan,
And he fought like ten devils at Monteluro
and got nothing but the victory
And old Sforza bitched us at Pèsaro;
[sic] March the 16th:
" that Messire Alessandro Sforza
is become lord of Pèsaro

through the wangle of the Illus. Sgr. Mr. Fedricho d'Orbino,
Who worked the wangle with Galeaz
through the wiggling of Messer Francesco
Who waggled it so that Galeaz should sell Pèsaro
to Alex and Fossembrane to Feddy;
and he hadn't the right to sell.
And this he did bestialmente; that is Sforza did bestialmente

Dij

Genevra
d'Este

32

Polixena
Sforza

as he had promised him, Sigismundo, *per capitoli*
to see that he, Malatesta, should have Pèsaro"
And this cut us off from our south half
and finished our game, thus, in the beginning,
And he, Sigismundo, spoke his mind to Francesco
and we drove them out of the Marches.

And the King o' Ragona, Alphonse le roy d'Aragon,
was the next nail in our coffin,
And all you can say is, anyway, that he Sigismundo called a town council
And Valturio said "as well for a sheep as a lamb"
and this change-over (*hæc traditio*)
As old bladder said "*rem eorum saluavit*"
Saved the Florentine state; and that, maybe, was something.
And "Florence our natural ally" as they said in the meeting
for whatever that was worth afterward.

And he began building the TEMPIO,
and Polixena, his second wife, died.
And the Venetians sent down an ambassador
And said "speak humanely, but tell him it's no time for raising his pay."
And the Venetians sent down an ambassador
with three pages of secret instructions

To the effect: Did he think the campaign was a joy-ride?
And old Wattle-wattle slipped into Milan
But he couldn't stand Sidg being so high with the Venetians
And he talked it over with Teddy; and Teddy said "Pèsaro"
And old Foscari wrote "*Caro mio*
" If we split with Francesco you can have it
" And we'll help you in every way possible."
But Teddy offered it sooner.

And Sigismundo got up a few arches,
And stole that marble in Classe, "stole" that is,
*Casus est talis:*

*Foscari doge*, to the prefect of Ravenna
"Why, what; which, thunder, damnation ? ? ? ?"

*Casus est talis:*

Filippo, commendatary of the abbazia
Of Sant Apollinaire, Classe, Cardinal of Bologna
That he did one night (*quadam nocte*) sell to the
Illmo Dº., D² Sigismund Malatesta

In Classe

Lord of Arimnium, marble, porphyry, serpentine,
Whose men, Sigismundo's, came with more than an hundred
two wheeled ox carts and deported, for the beautifying
of the *tempio* where was Santa Maria in Trivio