I know it to be true that those who live
As do the grasses and the lilies of the field
Receiving joy from Heaven, sweetly yield
Their joy to Earth, and taking Beauty, give.
But we are gathered for the looms of Fate
That Time with ever-turning multiplying wheels
Spins into complex patterns and conceals
His huge invention with forms intricate.
Each generation blindly fills the plan,
A sorry muddle or an inspiration of God
With many processes from out the sod,
The Earth and Heaven are mingled and made man.
We must be tired and sleepless, gaily sad,
Frothing like waves in clamorous confusion,
A chemistry of subtle interfusion,
Experiments of genius that the ignorant call mad.
We spell the crimes of our unruly days,
We see a fabled Arcady in our mind,
We crave perfection that we may not find.
Time laughs within the clock and Destiny plays.
You peasants and you hermits, simple livers!
So picturesquely pure, all unconcerned
While we give up our bodies to be burned,
And dredge for treasure in the muddy rivers.
We drink and die and sell ourselves for power,
We hunt with treacherous steps and stealthy knife,
We make a gaudy havoc of our life
And live a thousand ages in an hour.
Our loves are spoilt by introspective guile,
We vivisect our souls with elaborate tools,
We dance in couples to the tune of fools,
And dream of harassed continents the while.
Subconscious visions hold us and we fashion
Delirious verses, tortured statues, spasms of paint,
Make cryptic perorations of complaint,
Inverted religion, and perverted passion.
But since we are children of this age,
In curious ways discovering salvation,
I will not quit my muddled generation,
But ever plead for Beauty in this rage.
Although I know that Nature's bounty yields
Unto simplicity a beautiful content,
Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent
Will I give back my body to the fields.
1917
Shall we be christened poets, children of God,
For blowing sighs into the listeners' ears,
For tugging at the moaning bells of death,
And coming as the autumn grave-digger
To close the eyes of flowers, and shut the fingers
Of wind upon the rushes,
Of music upon silence?
Shall we be given wreathes of bay and laurel
For forcing tragedy into a rhyme
As a gaunt beggar in a spangled vest?
The poet ever wanders after Death,
The flunkey on a funeral chariot
Pouring the wine at feasts of burial;
And all the roses that he plucks from summer
Are carried to the crypts to deck a corpse....
How shall the world learn how to laugh again
When all its songs have only learnt to weep?
1919
When I am weary at the antic chance,
The hobby-horses and the wooden lance,
The hope and fear in jugglery, and see
How starved the juggler, mean and miserly,
And life a laboured trick--the years advance
A shrilling chorus in affected dance
With lust of many eyes that watch and wink
Fixed on them; or a clown in feverish pink
Will draw gross laughter by a hideous prance--
Vulgarity and sin and souls askance,
Where fiddles squeal and all the follies spin--
Till, when the stage is empty, Harlequin
Through curtained silence trips as from a trance
With blushing flowers for Columbine--Romance.
1917