  Homer saw nations, armies, multitudes— You saw them in the intimate interludes Of Brutus' soul at midnight in a tent When the infection festers the event. Ulysses' course is changed by the sea's trough. You saw an epoch when a hat blows off. Orestes fled the Furies, won his peace Through Apollo in old Greece. But who unbars the mouse traps of your world, Or kills the ambushed serpent where it's curled? Your Fates return, and Fortinbras draws in On Hamlet's impotence and Gertrude's sin. All oceans in a raindrop, drops of dew Containing perfect heavens starred and blue; Angels who mother Calibans, and hopes Are of your vision—great mosaics hued With thoughts of princes, poets, misanthropes, Reveal their minute colors closer viewed. Atomies, maggots, worms or gilded flies, Nothing too small or foul is for your eyes. You made a culture of dreams lost or won Like Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson. You looked in heaven when the lightning shone, Then saw a fairy's whip of cricket bone. For gods and men bacteriologist Of spiritual microbes hidden which subsist In moments of red joy—calm satirist Of worlds forsaken for a woman's hair, Kings slain, states crumbled, heroes false or fair, The madness of the flesh, love on the wrack, A white maid married to a soldier black. Incests, adulteries and secret sins, The fall of monarchs and of manikins. All men at last a rattling empty pod, All men destroyed like flies for sport of God. All Life at last an idiot's furious tale— You had the strength to say this and not quail! For you what were the unities, the rules Of Plautus, Corneille or the Grecian schools? Flame through a pipe will sing, perhaps, when blown Against the craftsman's silver, but the tone Of worlds in conflagration, that's to be The sacred fire with wings outspread and free, Wherein an Athens falls, a Sidon stands, And where a freezing clown may warm his hands. If you could empty out a tiger's brain And wire up its spinal cord again To Sappho's brain, it would no doubt devour The tiger's nerves and sinews in an hour. Such muscles and such bones could not endure The avid hunger of a fire so pure. And you, Will Shakspeare, spirit sensitive, You lived past fifty, that is long to live And feed a flame like yours, and let the flame Remake itself and lap at flesh and frame. I say with Jesus, wisdom's eyes are blind To seek a poet out and think to find A slender reed that's shaken by the wind. Come cyclops of the counter, millionaires, Lawyers and statesmen in the world's affairs, And thin away like flesh which acid eats Under the passion even of John Keats. But if you felt and saw love, agony, As Shakspeare knew them you would quickly die. There is no tragedy like the gift of song, It keeps you mortal but demands you strong; It gives you God's eyes blurred with human tears, And crowns a thousand lives in fifty years. Enter the breathless silence where God dwells, See and record all heavens and all hells! |
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