Chapter I: Youth and the Sea

The mists unfolded on a sparkling coast
Washed by a violet sea.
It was no dream.
The clustering irised bubbles in the foam,
The grinding stir as through the shining pebbles
The wave ran back; the little drifts of smoke
Where wet black rocks dried grey in the hot sun;
The pods of sea-weed, crackling underfoot,
All told me this.
My comrade at my side,
Moved like a shadow. I turned a promontory,
And like a memory of my own lost youth,
Shining and far, across the gulf I saw
Stagira, like a little city of snow,
Under the Thracian hills.
Nothing had changed.
I saw the City where that Greek was born
Who ranged all art, all life, and lit a fire
That shines yet, after twice a thousand years;
And strange, but strange as truth, it was to hear
No slightest change in that old rhythmic sound
Of waves against the shore.
Then, at my side,
My soul’s companion whispered, all unseen,
‘Two thousand years have hidden him from the world,
Robed him in grey and bearded him with eld,
Untrue to his warm life. There was a time
When he was young as truth is; and the sun
Browned his young body, danced in his young grey eyes;
And look—the time is now.’
There, as he spoke,
I saw among the rocks on my right hand,
Lying, face downward, over a deep rock-pool,
A youth, so still that, till a herring-gull swooped
And sheered away from him with a startled cry
And a wild flutter of its brown mottled wings,
I had not seen him.
Quietly we drew near,
As shadows may, unseen.
He pored intent
Upon a sea-anemone, like a flower
Opening its disk of blue and crimson rays
Under the lucid water.
He stretched his hand,
And with a sea-gull’s feather, touched its heart.
The bright disk shrank, and closed, as though a flower
Turned instantly to fruit, ripe, soft, and round
As the pursed lips of a sea-god hiding there.
They fastened, sucking, on the quill and held it.
Young Aristotle laughed. He rose to his feet.
“Come and see this!” he called.
Under the cliff
Nicomachus arose, and drawing his robe
More closely round him, crossed the slippery rocks
To join his son.
There, side by side, they crouched
Over the limpid pool,—the grey physician
And eager boy.
“See, how it grips the feather!
And grips the rock, too. Yet it has no roots.
Your sea-flowers turn to animals with mouths.
Take out the quill. Now it turns back again
Into a flower; look—look—what lovely colours,
What marvellous artistry.
This never was formed
By chance. It has an aim beyond this pool.
What does it mean? This unity of design?
This delicate scale of life that seems to ascend
Without a break, through all the forms of earth
From plants to men? The sea-sponge that I found
Grew like a blind rock-rooted clump of moss
Dilating in water, shrinking in the sun;
I know it for a strange sea-animal now,
Shaped like the brain of a man. Can it be true
That, as the poets fable in their songs
Of Aphrodite, life itself was born
Here, in the sea?”
Nicomachus looked at him.
“That’s a dark riddle, my son. You will not hear
An answer in the groves of Academe,
Not even from Plato. When you go to Athens
Next year, remember, among the loftiest flights
Of their philosophy, that the living truth
Is here on earth if we could only see it.
This, this at least, all true Asclepiads know.
Remember, always, in that battle of words,
The truth that father handed down to son
Through the long line of men that served their kind
From Æsculapius, father of us all,
To you his own descendant:—naught avails
In science, till the light you seize from heaven
Shines through the clear sharp fact beneath your feet.
This is the test of both—that, in their wedding,
The light that was a disembodied dream
Burns through the fact, and makes a lanthorn of it,
Transfigures it, confirms it, gives it new
And deeper meanings; and itself, in turn,
Is thereby seen more truly.
Use your eyes;
And you, or those that follow you, will outsoar
Pythagoras.
He believed the soul descends
From the pure realm of gods; is clothed with clay;
And, struggling upward through a myriad forms,
After a myriad lives and deaths, returns
Enriched with all those memories, lord of all
That knowledge, master of all those griefs and pains
As else it could not be, home to the gods,
Itself a god, prepared for the full bliss,
The living consummation of the whole.
Earth must be old, if all these things are true.
But take this tale and read it. If it seem
Only a tale, the light in it has turned
Dark facts to lanthorns for me. There are tales
More true than any fragment of the truth.

One of his homeless clan (who came to me
Dying), his last disciple’s wandering son,
Gave me the scroll. I give it now to you,—
The young swift-footed runner with the fire.
You’ll find strange thoughts; and, woven into the close,
His Golden Verses, with a thought more strange.”

Then, from his breast, the Asclepiad drew a scroll,
Smooth as old ivory, honey-stained by time,
A wand of whispering magic; and the boy
Seized it with brown young hands.
His father smiled
And turned away, between the shining pools
To seek Stagira. Under his sandalled feet
The sea-weeds crackled. His footsteps crunched away
Along the beach.
Upon a sun-warmed rock
The boy outspread the curled papyrus-roll,
Keeping each corner in place with a small grey stone.
There, while the white robe drifting down the coast
Grew smaller and smaller, till at last it seemed
A flake of vanishing foam, he lay full length,
Reading the tale.
The salt on his brown skin
Dried to a faint white powder in the sun.
Over him, growing bold, the peering gulls
Wheeled closer, as he lay there, tranced and still;
Till, through the tale, the golden verses breathed
Like a returning music, rhythmic tones
Changed by new voices, coloured by new minds,
Yet speaking still for one time-conquering soul,
As on the shore the wandering ripples changed
And tossed new spray-drops into the sparkling air,
Yet pulsed with the ancient breathing of the sea:

_Guard the immortal fire._
_Honour the glorious line of the great dead._
_To the new height let all thy soul aspire;_
_But let those memories be thy wine and bread._

_Quench not in any shrine_
_The smouldering storax. In no human heart_
_Quench what love kindled. Faintly though it shine,_
_Not till it wholly dies the gods depart._

_Truth has remembering eyes._
_The wind-blown throng will clamour at Falsehood’s gate._
_Has Falsehood triumphed? Let the world despise_
_Thy constant mind. Stand thou aside, and wait._

_Write not thy thoughts on snow._
_Grave them in rock to front the thundering sky._
_From Time’s proud feast, when it is time to go,_
_Take the dark road; bid one more world good-bye._

_The lie may steal an hour._
_The truth has living roots, and they strike deep._
_A moment’s glory kills the rootless flower,_
_While the true stem is gathering strength in sleep._

_Out of this earth, this dust,_
_Out of this flesh, this blood, this living tomb;_
_Out of these cosmic throes of wrath, and lust,_
_Breaks the lost splendour from the world’s blind womb._

_Courage, O conquering soul!_
_For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,_
_Though suns and stars into oblivion roll,_
_The gods abide, and of their race art thou._