Read "Cortège for Rosenbloom" by Wallace Stevens online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead / And his finical carriers tread, / On a hundred legs, the tread / Of the dead. / Rosenbloom is dead.
They carry the wizened one / Of the color of horn / To the sullen hill, / Treading a tread / In unison for the dead.
Rosenbloom is dead. / The tread of the carriers does not halt / On the hill, but turns / Up the sky. / They are bearing his body into the sky.
It is the infants of misanthropes / And the infants of nothingness / That tread / The wooden ascents / Of the ascending of the dead.
It is turbans they wear / And boots of fur / As they tread the boards / In a region of frost, / Viewing the frost.
To a chirr of gongs / And a chitter of cries / And the heavy thrum / Of the endless tread / That they tread.
To a jangle of doom / And a jumble of words / Of the intense poem / Of the strictest prose / Of Rosenbloom.
And they bury him there, / Body and soul, / In a place in the sky. / The lamentable tread! / Rosenbloom is dead.