Page:Harmonium - Wallace Stevens.djvu/119

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Architecture

I
What manner of building shall we build?
Let us design a chastel de chasteté.
De pensée. . . .
Never cease to deploy the structure.
Keep the laborers shouldering plinths.
Pass the whole of life earing the clink of the
Chisels of the stone-cutters cutting the stones.

II
In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?
What heavenly dithyramb
And cantilene?
What niggling forms of gargoyle patter?
Of what shall the speech be,
In that splay of marble
And of obedient pillars?

III
And how shall those come vested that come there?
In their ugly reminders?
Or gaudy as tulips?
As they climb the stairs

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