Boys and girls are dancing flushed and dripping dancing to the beat on drums and piping on flutes and jiggle of the long notes of accordions and the wild tune swirls and sweeps along the frosty streets, leaps above the dark stone houses out among the crackling stars. _Esta noche es noche buena nadie piensa a dormir._ In the street a ragged boy too poor to own a tambourine slips off his shoes and beats them together to the drunken reeling time, dances on his naked feet. _Esta noche es noche buena nadie piensa a dormir._ _Madrid_ XVII The old strong towers the Moors built on the ruins of a Roman camp have sprung into spreading boistrous foam of daisies and alyssum flowers, and sprout of clover and veiling grass from out of the cracks in the tawny stones makes velvet soft the worn stairs and grooved walks where clanked the heels of the grave mailed knights who had driven and killed the darkskinned Moors, and where on silken knees their sons knelt on the nights of the full moon to vow strange deeds for their lady's grace. The old strong towers are crumbled and doddering now and sit like old men smiling in the sun. About them clamber the giggling flowers and below the sceptic sea gently laughing in daisywhite foam on the beach rocks the ships with flapping sails that flash white to the white village on the shore. On a wall where the path is soft with flowers the brown goatboy lies, his cap askew and whistles out over the beckoning sea the tune the village band jerks out, a shine of brass in the square below: a swaggering young buck of a tune that slouches cap on one side, cigarette at an impudent tilt, out past the old toothless and smilingly powerless towers, out over the ever-youthful sea that claps bright cobalt hands in time and laughs along the tawny beaches. _Denia_ XVIII How fine to die in Denia young in the ardent strength of sun calm in the burning blue of the sea in the stabile clasp of the iron hills; Denia where the earth is red as rust and hills grey like ash. O to rot into the ruddy soil to melt into the omnipotent fire of the young white god, the flamegod the sun, to find swift resurrection in the warm grapes born of earth and sun that are crushed to must under the feet of girls and lads, to flow for new generations of men a wine full of earth of sun. XIX