Lines That Could Have Been Written and Lost Round About 1922

Silent battles of the sunset
in the outlying suburbs,
forever ancient defeats of a war in the sky,
meager dawns that reach us
from the deserted bottom of space
as from the bottom of time,
black gardens of the rain, the Sphinx in a book
which I feared to open
and whose image returns in dreams,
the corruption and the echo we shall be,
moon on the marble,
trees that rise up and endure
like tranquil divinities,
the mutual night and the awaited evening,
Walt Whitman, whose name is the universe,
the valiant sword of a king
on the silent bed of a river,
the Saxons, the Arabs, and the Goths
who, without knowing, would engender me,
am I these things and the others
or are there secret keys and difficult algebras
of which we know nothing?