Chapter VII: Her Friends Bring Her a Christmas Tree

Pardon, great enemy,
Without an angry thought
We've carried in our tree,
And here and there have bought
Till all the boughs are gay,
And she may look from the bed
On pretty things that may
Please a fantastic head.
Give her a little grace,
What if a laughing eye
Have looked into your face--
It is about to die.

EGO DOMINUS TUUS

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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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.

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, 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, 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?

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, 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, The coarse-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 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. 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, 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.

A PRAYER ON GOING INTO MY HOUSE

God grant a blessing on this tower and cottage
And on my heirs, if all remain unspoiled,
No table, or chair or stool not simple enough
For shepherd lads in Galilee; and grant
That I myself for portions of the year
May handle nothing and set eyes on nothing
But what the great and passionate have used
Throughout so many varying centuries.
We take it for the norm; yet should I dream
Sinbad the sailor's brought a painted chest,
Or image, from beyond the Loadstone Mountain
That dream is a norm; and should some limb of the devil
Destroy the view by cutting down an ash
That shades the road, or setting up a cottage
Planned in a government office, shorten his life,
Manacle his soul upon the Red Sea bottom.

THE PHASES OF THE MOON

_An old man cocked his ear upon a bridge; He and his friend, their faces to the South, Had trod the uneven road. Their boots were soiled, Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape; They had kept a steady pace as though their beds, Despite a dwindling and late risen moon, Were distant. An old man cocked his ear._

AHERNE

What made that sound?

ROBARTES

A rat or water-hen Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream. We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower, And the light proves that he is reading still. He has found, after the manner of his kind, Mere images; chosen this place to live in Because, it may be, of the candle light From the far tower where Milton's platonist Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince: The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved, An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil; And now he seeks in book or manuscript What he shall never find.

AHERNE

Why should not you Who know it all ring at his door, and speak Just truth enough to show that his whole life Will scarcely find for him a broken crust Of all those truths that are your daily bread; And when you have spoken take the roads again?

ROBARTES

He wrote of me in that extravagant style He had learnt from Pater, and to round his tale Said I was dead; and dead I chose to be.

AHERNE

Sing me the changes of the moon once more; True song, though speech: 'mine author sung it me.'

ROBARTES

Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon, The full and the moon's dark and all the crescents, Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in: For there's no human life at the full or the dark. From the first crescent to the half, the dream But summons to adventure and the man Is always happy like a bird or a beast; But while the moon is rounding towards the full He follows whatever whim's most difficult Among whims not impossible, and though scarred As with the cat-o'-nine-tails of the mind, His body moulded from within his body Grows comelier. Eleven pass, and then Athenae takes Achilles by the hair, Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born, Because the heroes' crescent is the twelfth. And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must, Before the full moon, helpless as a worm. The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war In its own being, and when that war's begun There is no muscle in the arm; and after Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon The soul begins to tremble into stillness, To die into the labyrinth of itself!

AHERNE

Sing out the song; sing to the end, and sing The strange reward of all that discipline.

ROBARTES

All thought becomes an image and the soul Becomes a body: that body and that soul Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle, Too lonely for the traffic of the world: Body and soul cast out and cast away Beyond the visible world.

AHERNE

All dreams of the soul
End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.

ROBARTES

Have you not always known it?

AHERNE

The song will have it That those that we have loved got their long fingers From death, and wounds, or on Sinai's top, Or from some bloody whip in their own hands. They ran from cradle to cradle till at last Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness Of body and soul.

ROBARTES

The lovers' heart knows that.

AHERNE

It must be that the terror in their eyes Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.

ROBARTES

When the moon's full those creatures of the full Are met on the waste hills by country men Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves, Caught up in contemplation, the mind's eye Fixed upon images that once were thought, For separate, perfect, and immovable Images can break the solitude Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.

_And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice Aherne laughed, thinking of the man within, His sleepless candle and laborious pen._

ROBARTES

And after that the crumbling of the moon. The soul remembering its loneliness Shudders in many cradles; all is changed, It would be the World's servant, and as it serves, Choosing whatever task's most difficult Among tasks not impossible, it takes Upon the body and upon the soul The coarseness of the drudge.

AHERNE

Before the full
It sought itself and afterwards the world.

ROBARTES

Because you are forgotten, half out of life, And never wrote a book your thought is clear. Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man, Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn, Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all Deformed because there is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

AHERNE

And what of those
That the last servile crescent has set free?

ROBARTES

Because all dark, like those that are all light, They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud, Crying to one another like the bats; And having no desire they cannot tell What's good or bad, or what it is to triumph At the perfection of one's own obedience; And yet they speak what's blown into the mind; Deformed beyond deformity, unformed, Insipid as the dough before it is baked, They change their bodies at a word.

AHERNE

And then?

ROBARTES

When all the dough has been so kneaded up That it can take what form cook Nature fancy The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more.

AHERNE

But the escape; the song's not finished yet.

ROBARTES

Hunchback and saint and fool are the last crescents. The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow Out of the up and down, the wagon wheel Of beauty's cruelty and wisdom's chatter, Out of that raving tide is drawn betwixt Deformity of body and of mind.

AHERNE

Were not our beds far off I'd ring the bell, Stand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall Beside the castle door, where all is stark Austerity, a place set out for wisdom That he will never find; I'd play a part; He would never know me after all these years But take me for some drunken country man; I'd stand and mutter there until he caught 'Hunchback and saint and fool,' and that they came Under the three last crescents of the moon, And then I'd stagger out. He'd crack his wits Day after day, yet never find the meaning.

_And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard Should be so simple--a bat rose from the hazels And circled round him with its squeaky cry, The light in the tower window was put out._

THE CAT AND THE MOON

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For wander and wail as he would
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass,
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet
What better than call a dance,
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

THE SAINT AND THE HUNCHBACK

HUNCHBACK

Stand up and lift your hand and bless A man that finds great bitterness In thinking of his lost renown. A Roman Caesar is held down Under this hump.

SAINT

God tries each man According to a different plan. I shall not cease to bless because I lay about me with the taws That night and morning I may thrash Greek Alexander from my flesh, Augustus Caesar, and after these That great rogue Alcibiades.

HUNCHBACK

To all that in your flesh have stood And blessed, I give my gratitude, Honoured by all in their degrees, But most to Alcibiades.

TWO SONGS OF A FOOL

I

A speckled cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And sleep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence
As I look up to Providence.

I start out of my sleep to think
Some day I may forget
Their food and drink;
Or, the house door left unshut,
The hare may run till it's found
The horn's sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

I bear a burden that might well try
Men that do all by rule,
And what can I
That am a wandering witted fool
But pray to God that He ease
My great responsibilities.