LITMIR.BIZ

      On the grey sand beside the shallow stream,

      Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still

      A lamp burns on above the open book

      That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon,

      And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace,

      Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion,

      Magical shapes.

      By the help of an image

      I call to my own opposite, summon all

      That I have handled least, least looked upon.

      And I would find myself and not an image.

      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.

      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.

      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 fashioned from his opposite

      An image that might have been a stony face,

      Staring upon a Beduin’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;

      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.

      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.

      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 is it 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?

      And yet,

      No one denies to Keats love of the world,

      Remember his deliberate happiness.

      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 sweetshop 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 ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper —

      Luxuriant song.

      Why should you leave the lamp

      Burning alone beside an open book,

      And trace these characters upon the sand?

      A style is found by sedentary toil,

      And by the imitation of great masters.

      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 sand by the water’s edge,

      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.