Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now (the bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth “Hitting on all thirty-two”; scholarship pares The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores His “passionate underwear”; morality disciplines the other Person; snakes speak the idiom of Rousseau; Prospero Serves Humanity in steam-heated universities, three Thousand dollars a year;--for simplicity is obscene. Sunlight topples indignant from the hill. In every railway station everywhere, every lover Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke Thickens. Ticket in hand he pumps his body Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip, His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice, or spiders Distract him from nonentity; for his metaphors are dead. _Notescatque magis mortuus atque magis,_ _Nec tenuem texens sublimis aranea telam...._ The motto to the poem is from an American newspaper: ... party on the stage of the Earl Carrol Theatre on February 23. At this party Joyce Hawley, a chorus-girl, bathed in the nude in a bathtub filled with alleged wine. The comic technique is devoted to a contrast between Imperial America and Imperial Rome in general conversational style. The mind, in being democratized, runs the theme, has grown large, complicated, vulgar and dead. The poet’s clownishness consists in swift and showy acrobatic turns from present-day vulgar sophistication to the comparative simplicity of classical manners and from classical civilization on the other hand to twentieth-century vocabularistic vulgarity. A snobbish prejudice in favour of classical phrasing is the special privilege in which this poet indulges himself. The Latin verse from Catullus reads: “And may he when dead grow more and more famous, nor may the spider spinning its fine thread from above ... (make a web upon the forgotten name of Allius).” The quotation, somewhat forced in its application we must confess, is from an elegy on the death of Allius, a friend who has helped Catullus in his intrigues by providing him and his Lesbia with a rendezvous at the house of a mistress of his own: for which Catullus thanks him in all frankness and simplicity. The vultures occur in this poem of Catullus’: and “hitting on all thirty-two”--an advertisement for a tooth-paste--is probably an ironic comment in the style of Catullus’ ironic comment on the fine teeth of his friend Egnatius. Prospero is the symbol of learning, which did not become, until advanced times, humanitarian and democratic, commercialized and vulgar. The element of humour in this poem is not entirely sincere because the prejudice is somewhat too dogmatic, the poet failing to identify