Fireworks

Pink faces—(worlds or flowers or seas or stars),
You all alike are patterned with hot bars

Of coloured light; and falling where I stand,
The sharp and rainbow splinters from the band

Seem fireworks, splinters of the Infinite—
(Glitter of leaves the echoes). And the night

Will weld this dust of bright Infinity
To forms that we may touch and call and see:—

Pink pyramids of faces: tulip-trees
Spilling night perfumes on the terraces.

The music, blond airs waving like a sea
Draws in its vortex of immensity

The new-awakened flower-strange hair and eyes
Of crowds beneath the floating summer skies.

And, ’gainst the silk pavilions of the sea
I watch the people move incessantly

Vibrating, petals blown from flower-hued stars
Beneath the music-fireworks’ waving bars;

So all seems indivisible, at one:
The flow of hair, the flowers, the seas that run,—

A coloured floating music of the night
Through the pavilions of the Infinite.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 23, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Fireworks” first appeared in Edith Sitwell’s Clowns’ Houses (B. H. Blackwell, 1918). In his biography of Sitwell, Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius (Virago, 2011), Richard Greene writes, “The theme of this poem is actually very traditional; though comprising oddly-sorted images, it is still a search for metaphysical unity. It is a mixture of [Charles] Baudelaire and William Blake. The pavilions beside the sea are an evocation of Scarborough in her childhood, but she has gone for the effect of a kaleidoscope.”