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 Böcklin 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, 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 Böcklin 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.