| 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 |
