Ego Dominus Tuus
HicOn the grey sand beside the shallow stream,Under your old wind-beaten tower, where stillA lamp burns on above the open bookThat 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.
IlleBy the help of an imageI call to my own opposite, summon allThat I have handled least, least looked upon.
HicAnd I would find myself and not an image.
IlleThat is our modern hope, and by its lightWe have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mindAnd 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.
HicAnd yet,The chief imagination of Christendom,Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself,That he has made that hollow face of hisMore plain to the mind’s eye than any faceBut that of Christ.
IlleAnd did he find himself,Or was the hunger that had made it hollowA hunger for the apple on the boughMost out of reach? And is that spectral imageThe man that Lapo and that Guido knew?I think he fashioned from his oppositeAn image that might have been a stony face,Staring upon a Beduin’s horse-hair roof,From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturnedAmong 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 outTo climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,He found the unpersuadable justice, he foundThe most exalted lady loved by a man.
HicYet surely there are men who have made their artOut of no tragic war; lovers of life,Impulsive men, that look for happiness,And sing when they have found it.
IlleNo, 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 is it action,The struggle of the fly in marmalade.The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,The sentimentalist himself; while artIs 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?
HicAnd yet,No one denies to Keats love of the world,Remember his deliberate happiness.
IlleHis art is happy, but who knows his mind?I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop 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 ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper—Luxuriant song.
HicWhy should you leave the lampBurning alone beside an open book,And trace these characters upon the sand?A style is found by sedentary toil,And by the imitation of great masters.
IlleBecause I seek an image, not a book;Those men that in their writings are most wiseOwn nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.I call to the mysterious one who yetShall walk the wet sand by the water’s edge,And look most like me, being indeed my double,And prove of all imaginable thingsThe most unlike, being my anti-self,And, standing by these characters, discloseAll that I seek; and whisper it as thoughHe were afraid the birds, who cry aloudTheir momentary cries before it is dawn,Would carry it away to blasphemous men.
December 1915.