| |
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. | |
| |
Hic
And I would find myself and not an image. | 10 |
| |
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 | |
| We are but critics, or but half create, | 15 |
| 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 | 20 |
| 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 | 25 |
| The man that Lapo and that Guido knew? | |
| I think he fashioned 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 | 30 |
| Among the coarse grass 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, | 35 |
| 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 | 40 |
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. | 45 |
| The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors, | |
| 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, | 50 |
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 school-boy when I think of him | 55 |
| 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, | 60 |
| The ill-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 | 65 |
| 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, stupified hearts. | |
| I call to the mysterious one who yet | 70 |
| Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream | |
| And look most like me, being indeed my double, | |
| And prove if all imaginable things | |
| The most unlike, being my anti-self, | |
| And standing by these characters disclose | 75 |
| 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. | |
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