The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little as the browsing goats
Of form or feature of humanity
Up there, in fact, had travelled five miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them,
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso, -hand that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down
To all the country pastures. 'T is even thus
With times we live in, evermore too great
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things as intimately deep
As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
To sing - oh, not of lizard or of toad
Alive i' the ditch there, 't were excusable,
But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones;
And that's no wonder: death inherits death.
Nay, if there's room for poets in this world
A little overgrown, (I think here is)
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne's, — this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.
To flinch from modern varnish, coat, or flounce,
Cry out for togas and the picturesque,
Is fatal, — foolish too. King Arthur's self
Was commonplace to Lady Guinevere;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat,
As Fleet Street to our poets.
THERE he lay upon his back,
The yearling creature, warm and moist with life
To the bottom of his dimples, - to the ends
Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;
For since he had been covered over-much
To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose
The shepherd's heart-blood ebbed away into
The faster for his love. And love was here
As instant in the pretty baby-mouth,
Shut close, as if for dreaming that it sucked;
The little naked feet, drawn up the way
Of nestled birdlings; everything so soft
And tender, to the tiny holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of 't.
While we stood there dumb;
For oh, that it should take such innocence
To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb,—
The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,
And staring out at us with all their blue,
As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence, gradually
He saw his mother's face, accepting it
In change for heaven itself with such a smile
As might have well been learnt there, never moved,
But smiled on in a drowse of ecstasy,
So happy (half with her, and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said?
As red and still indeed as any rose,
That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.
THE CONDITIONS OF TRUE ART.
TRUTH, So far, in my book, the truth which draws Through all things upwards, - that a twofold world Natural things
Must go to a perfect cosmos.
who separates those two
In art, in morals, or the social drift,
Tears up the bond of nature, and brings death,
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,
Is wrong, in short, at all points. We divide
This apple of life, and cut it through the pips:
The perfect round which fitted Venus' hand
Has perished as utterly as if we ate
Both halves. Without the spiritual, observe,
The natural's impossible, no form,
No motion: without sensuous, spiritual
Is inappreciable, no beauty or power.
And in this twofold sphere the twofold man
(For still the artist is intensely a man)
Holds firmly by the natural to reach
The spiritual beyond it, fixes still
The type with mortal vision to pierce through,
With eyes immortal to the ante-type
Some call the ideal, better called the real,
And certain to be called so presently,
When things shall have their names. Look long enough
On any peasant's face here, coarse and lined,
You'll catch Antinous somewhere in that clay,
As perfect-featured as he yearns at Rome
From marble pale with beauty; then persist,
And, if your apprehension 's competent,
You'll find some fairer angel at his back,
As much exceeding him as he the boor,
And pushing him with imperial disdain
For ever out of sight. Ay, Carrington
Is glad of such a creed: an artist must,
Who paints a tree, a leaf, a common stone,
With just his hand, and finds it suddenly
A piece with and conterminous to his soul.
Why else do these things move him, — leaf, or stone?
The bird's not moved, that pecks at a spring-shoot;
Nor yet the horse, before a quarry agraze:
But man, the twofold creature, apprehends
The twofold manner, in and outwardly,
And nothing in the world comes single to him,
A mere itself, cup, column, or candlestick,
All patterns of what shall be in the Mount;
The whole temporal show related royally,
And built up to eterne significance
Through the open arms of God. 'There's nothing great
Nor small,' has said a poet of our day,
Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve,
And not be thrown out by the matin's bell:
And truly, I reiterate, Nothing's small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim ;
And (glancing on my own thin, veinèd wrist)
In such a little tremor of the blood
The whole strong clamor of a vehement soul
Doth utter itself distinct. Earth 's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more from the first similitude.
Truth, so far, in my book!—a truth which draws
From all things upward. I, Aurora, still
Have felt it hound me through the wastes of life
As Jove did Io; and until that hand
Shall overtake me wholly, and on my head
Lay down its large unfluctuating peace,
The feverish gad-fly pricks me up and down.
It must be. Art's the witness of what is
Behind this show. If this world's show were all,
Then imitation would be all in Art.
There Jove's hand gripes us! for we stand here, we,
If genuine artists, witnessing for God's
Complete, consummate, undivided work!
– That every natural flower which grows on earth Implies a flower upon the spiritual side,
Substantial, archetypal, all aglow
But we whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared,
May catch at something of the bloom and breath,
Too vaguely apprehended, though, indeed,
Still apprehended, consciously or not,
And still transferred to picture, music, verse,
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