On the Decline of Oracles My father kept a vaulted conch By two bronze bookends of ships in sail, And as I listened its cold teeth seethed With voices of that ambiguous sea Old Bocklin missed, who held a shell To hear the sea he could not hear. What the seashell spoke to his inner ear He knew, but no peasants know. My father died, and when he died He willed his books and shell away. The books burned up, the sea took the shell, But I, I keep the voices he Set in my ear, and in my eye The sight of those blue, unseen waves For which the ghost of Bocklin grieves. The peasants feast and multiply. Eclipsing the spitted ox I see Neither brazen swan nor burning star, Heraldry of a starker age, But three men entering the yard, And those men coming up the stair. Profitless, their gossiping images Invade the cloistral eye like pages From a gross comic strip, and toward The happening of this happening The earth turns now. In half an hour I shall go down the shabby stair and meet, Coming up, those three. Worth Less than present, past--this future. Worthless such vision to eyes gone dull That once descried Troy's towers fall, Saw evil break out of the north. --Sylvia Plath --

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