Hic. |
On the grey sand beside the shallow stream |
|
Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still |
|
A lamp burns on beside the open book |
|
That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon |
|
And though you have passed the best of life still trace |
5 |
Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion |
|
Magical shapes. |
|
|
Ille. |
By the help of an image |
|
I call to my own opposite, summon all |
|
That I have handled least, least looked upon. |
10 |
|
Hic. |
And I would find myself and not an image. |
|
|
Ille. |
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 |
15 |
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 |
20 |
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, |
25 |
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 fashioned from his opposite |
30 |
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 coarse grass and the camel dung. |
|
He set his chisel to the hardest stone. |
35 |
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. |
40 |
|
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, |
45 |
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, |
50 |
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? |
55 |
|
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, |
60 |
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, |
65 |
The coarse-bred son of a livery stablekeeper— |
|
Luxuriant song. |
|
|
Hic. |
Why should you leave the lamp |
|
Burning alone beside an open book |
|
And trace these characters upon the sands; |
70 |
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. |
75 |
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, |
80 |
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. |
85 |