The World Without Imagination by Wallace Stevens

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, / The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates / Of snails, musician of pears, principium / And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig / Of things, this nincompated pedagogue, / Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea / Created, in his day, a touch of doubt. / An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes, / Berries of villages, a barber's eye, / An eye of land, of simple salad-beds, / Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung / On porpoises, instead of apricots, / And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts / Dibbled in waves that were mustachios, / Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.

One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha. / It was not so much the lost terrestrial, / The snug hibernal from that sea and salt, / That century of wind in a single puff. / What counted was mythology of self, / Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin, / The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane, / The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak / Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw / Of hum, inquisitorial botanist, / And general lexicographer of mute / And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself, / A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass. / What word split up in clickering syllables / And storming under multitudinous tones / Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? / Crispin was washed away by magnitude. / The whole of life that still remained in him / Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear, / Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, / Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust.