O silver-throated Swan
Struck, struck! A golden dart
Clean through thy breast has gone
Home to thy heart.
Thrill, thrill, O silver throat!
O silver trumpet, pour
Love for defiance back
On him who smote!
And brim, brim o’er
With love; and ruby-dye thy track
Down thy last living reach
Of river, sail the golden light--
Enter the sun’s heart--even teach,
O wondrous-gifted pain, teach thou
The God to love, let him learn how!
When I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus I forgot that it is
something in our own eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence.
Has not Plotinus written: ‘Let every soul recall, then, at the outset
the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has
breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea,
all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the
maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts
all that rhythmic motion--and it is a principle distinct from all these
to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be
more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings
them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself,
is of eternal being’.