And Daughters with Curls by Wallace Stevens

Portentous enunciation, syllable / To blessed syllable affined, and sound / Bubbling felicity in cantilene, / Prolific and tormenting tenderness / Of music, as it comes to unison, / Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last / Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur / His grand pronunciamento and devise.

The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed, / Hands without touch yet touching poignantly, / Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee, / Prophetic joint, for its diviner young. / The return to social nature, once begun, / Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute, / Involved him in midwifery so dense / His cabin counted as philactary, / Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt / Of children nibbling at the sugared void, / Infants yet eminently old, then dome / And halidom for the unbraided femes, / Green crammers of the green fruits of the world, / Bidders and biders for its ecstasies, / True daughters both of Crispin and his clay. / All this with many mulctings of the man, / Effective colonizer sharply stopped / In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom. / But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs / Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints / Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex / The stopper to indulgent fatalist / Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon / His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant, / She seemed, of a country of the capuchins, / So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed, / Attentive to a coronal of things / Secret and singular. Second, upon / A second similar counterpart, a maid / Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake / Excepting to the motherly footstep, but / Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep. / Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light, / A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth, / Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified, / All din and gobble, blasphemously pink. / A few years more and the vermeil capuchin / Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was, / The dulcet omen fit for such a house. / The second sister dallying was shy / To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself / Out of her botches, hot embosomer. / The third one gaping at the orioles / Lettered herself demurely as became / A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody. / The fourth, pent now, a digit curious. / Four daughters in a world too intricate / In the beginning, four blithe instruments / Of differing struts, four voices several / In couch, four more persone, intimate / As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue / That should be silver, four accustomed seeds / Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights / That spread chromatics in hilarious dark, / Four questioners and four sure answerers.