A poet, when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his
mask and his vision without new bitterness, new disappointment. Could he
if he would, knowing how frail his vigour from youth up, copy Landor who
lived loving and hating, ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age,
all lost but the favour of his muses.
The mother of the muses we are taught
Is memory; she has left me; they remain
And shake my shoulder urging me to sing.
Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not
suffer any longer. He will buy perhaps some small old house where like
Ariosto he can dig his garden, and think that in the return of birds and
leaves, or moon and sun, and in the evening flight of the rooks he may
discover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and so never awake out of
vision. Then he will remember Wordsworth withering into eighty years,
honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room and find,
forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust.
_February_ 25, 1917.