Susa literatura - Poesia kaiera

Hic. / On the grey sand beside the shallow stream / Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still / A lamp bums 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 modem 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.