I See the Boys of Summer

I I see the boys of summer in their ruin/ Lay the gold tithings barren,/Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;/Theire in their heat the winter floods/Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,/And drown the cargoed apples in their tides. These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,/Sour the boiling honey;/The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;/There in the sun the frigid threads/Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;/The signal moon is zero in their voids. I see the summer children in their mothers/Split up the brawned womb's weathers,/Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;/There in the deep with quartered shades/Of sun and moon they paint their dams/As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads. I see that from these boys shall men of nothing/Stature by seedy shifting,/Or lame the air with leaping from its hearts;/There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse/Of love and light bursts in their throats./O see the pulse of summer in the ice. II But seasons must be challenged or they totter/Into a chiming quarter/Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;/There, in his night, the black-tongued bells/The sleepy man of winter pulls,/Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows. We are the dark deniers, let us summon/Death from a summer woman,/A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,/From the fair dead who flush the sea/The bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp,/And from the planted womb the man of straw. We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,/Green of the seaweed's iron,/Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,/Pick the world's ball of wave and froth/To choke the deserts with her tides,/And comb the county gardens for a wreath. In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,/Heigh ho the blood and berry,/And nail the merry squires to the trees;/Here love's damp muscle dries and dies,/Here break a kiss in no love's quarry./O see the poles of promise in the boys. III I SEE THE BOYS OF SUMMER IN THEIR RUIN. MAN IN HIS MAGGOT'S BARREN. AND BOYS ARE FULL AND FOREIGN IN THE POUCH I AM THE MAN YOUR FATHER WAS. WE ARE THE SONS OF FLINT AND PITCH. O SEE THE POLES ARE KISSING AS THEY CROSS. Dylan Thomas