Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). Picture-Show. 1920.

32. Limitations

IF you could crowd them into forty lines!

Yes; you can do it, once you get a start;

All that you want is waiting in your head,

For long-ago you’ve learnt it off by heart.

….

Begin: your mind’s the room where you have slept,

(Don’t pause for rhymes), till twilight woke you early.

The window stands wide-open, as it stood

When tree-tops loomed enchanted for a child

Hearing the dawn’s first thrushes through the wood

Warbling (you know the words) serene and wild.

You’ve said it all before: you dreamed of Death,

A dim Apollo in the bird-voiced breeze

That drifts across the morning veiled with showers,

While golden weather shines among dark trees.

You’ve got your limitations; let them sing,

And all your life will waken with a cry:

Why should you halt when rapture’s on the wing

And you’ve no limit but the cloud-flocked sky?…

But some chap shouts, ‘Here, stop it; that’s been done!’—

As God might holloa to the rising sun,

And then relent, because the glorying rays

Remind Him of green-glinting Eden days,

And Adam’s trustful eyes as he looks up

From carving eagles on his beechwood cup.

Young Adam knew his job; he could condense

Life to an eagle from the unknown immense.…

Go on, whoever you are; your lines can be

A whisper in the music from the weirs

Of song that plunge and tumble toward the sea

That is the uncharted mercy of our tears.

….

I told you it was easy! … Words are fools

Who follow blindly, once they get a lead.

But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools

Of quiet; seldom-seen: and all you need

Is just that flash of joy above your dream.

So, when those forty platitudes are done,

You’ll hear a bird-note calling from the stream

That wandered through your childhood; and the sun

Will strike the old flaming wonder from the waters.…

And there’ll be forty lines not yet begun.