The Wild Swans at Coole Part 6

That is our modern hope and by its light We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush We are but critics, or but half create, Timid, entangled, empty and abashed Lacking the countenance of our friends.

HIC

And yet The chief imagination of Christendom Dante Alighieri so utterly found himself That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.

ILLE

And did he find himself, Or was the hunger that had made it hollow A hunger for the apple on the bough Most out of reach? and is that spectral image The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?

I think he fas.h.i.+oned from his opposite An image that might have been a stony face, Staring upon a bedouin's horse-hair roof From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned Among the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s and the camel dung.

He set his chisel to the hardest stone.

Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life, Derided and deriding, driven out To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread, He found the unpersuadable justice, he found The most exalted lady loved by a man.

HIC

Yet surely there are men who have made their art Out of no tragic war, lovers of life, Impulsive men that look for happiness And sing when they have found it.

ILLE

No, not sing, For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular and full of influence, And should they paint or write still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality.

What portion in the world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream But dissipation and despair?

HIC

And yet No one denies to Keats love of the world; Remember his deliberate happiness.

ILLE

His art is happy but who knows his mind?

I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window, For certainly he sank into his grave His senses and his heart unsatisfied, And made--being poor, ailing and ignorant, Shut out from all the luxury of the world, The coa.r.s.e-bred son of a livery stable-keeper-- Luxuriant song.

HIC

Why should you leave the lamp Burning alone beside an open book, And trace these characters upon the sands; A style is found by sedentary toil And by the imitation of great masters.

ILLE

Because I seek an image, not a book.

Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

I call to the mysterious one who yet Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream And look most like me, being indeed my double, And prove of all imaginable things The most unlike, being my anti-self, And standing by these characters disclose All that I seek; and whisper it as though He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud Their momentary cries before it is dawn, Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

A PRAYER ON GOING INTO MY HOUSE

G.o.d grant a blessing on this tower and cottage And on my heirs, if all remain unspoiled, No table, or chair or stool not simple enough For shepherd lads in Galilee; and grant That I myself for portions of the year May handle nothing and set eyes on nothing But what the great and pa.s.sionate have used Throughout so many varying centuries.

We take it for the norm; yet should I dream Sinbad the sailor's brought a painted chest, Or image, from beyond the Loadstone Mountain That dream is a norm; and should some limb of the devil Destroy the view by cutting down an ash That shades the road, or setting up a cottage Planned in a government office, shorten his life, Manacle his soul upon the Red Sea bottom.

THE PHASES OF THE MOON

_An old man c.o.c.ked his ear upon a bridge; He and his friend, their faces to the South, Had trod the uneven road. Their boots were soiled, Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape; They had kept a steady pace as though their beds, Despite a dwindling and late risen moon, Were distant. An old man c.o.c.ked his ear._

AHERNE

What made that sound?

ROBARTES

A rat or water-hen Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream.

We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower, And the light proves that he is reading still.

He has found, after the manner of his kind, Mere images; chosen this place to live in Because, it may be, of the candle light From the far tower where Milton's platonist Sat late, or Sh.e.l.ley's visionary prince: The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved, An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil; And now he seeks in book or ma.n.u.script What he shall never find.

AHERNE

Why should not you Who know it all ring at his door, and speak Just truth enough to show that his whole life Will scarcely find for him a broken crust Of all those truths that are your daily bread; And when you have spoken take the roads again?

ROBARTES

He wrote of me in that extravagant style He had learnt from Pater, and to round his tale Said I was dead; and dead I chose to be.

AHERNE

Sing me the changes of the moon once more; True song, though speech: 'mine author sung it me.'

ROBARTES

Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon, The full and the moon's dark and all the crescents, Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in: For there's no human life at the full or the dark.

From the first crescent to the half, the dream But summons to adventure and the man Is always happy like a bird or a beast; But while the moon is rounding towards the full He follows whatever whim's most difficult Among whims not impossible, and though scarred As with the cat-o'-nine-tails of the mind, His body moulded from within his body Grows comelier. Eleven pa.s.s, and then Athenae takes Achilles by the hair, Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born, Because the heroes' crescent is the twelfth.

And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must, Before the full moon, helpless as a worm.

The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war In its own being, and when that war's begun There is no muscle in the arm; and after Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon The soul begins to tremble into stillness, To die into the labyrinth of itself!

AHERNE

Sing out the song; sing to the end, and sing The strange reward of all that discipline.

ROBARTES

All thought becomes an image and the soul Becomes a body: that body and that soul Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle, Too lonely for the traffic of the world: Body and soul cast out and cast away Beyond the visible world.

AHERNE

All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.