| AN old man cocked his ear upon a bridge; | |
| He and his friend, their faces to the South, | |
| Had trod the uneven road. Their boots were soiled, | |
| Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape; | |
| They had kept a steady pace as though their beds, | 5 |
| Despite a dwindling and late risen moon, | |
| Were distant. An old man cocked his ear. | |
| |
| Aherne | What made that sound? | |
| |
| Robartes | A rat or water-hen | |
| Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream. | 10 |
| We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower, | |
| And the light proves that he is reading still. | |
| He has found, after the manner of his kind, | |
| Mere images; chosen this place to live in | |
| Because, it may be, of the candle light | 15 |
| From the far tower where Milton’s platonist | |
| Sat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince: | |
| The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved, | |
| An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil; | |
| And now he seeks in book or manuscript | 20 |
| What he shall never find. | |
| |
| Aherne | Why should not you | |
| Who know it all ring at his door, and speak | |
| Just truth enough to show that his whole life | |
| Will scarcely find for him a broken crust | 25 |
| Of all those truths that are your daily bread; | |
| And when you have spoken take the roads again? | |
| |
| Robartes | He wrote of me in that extravagant style | |
| He had learnt from Pater, and to round his tale | |
| Said I was dead; and dead I chose to be. | 30 |
| |
| Aherne | Sing me the changes of the moon once more; | |
| True song, though speech: ‘mine author sung it me.’ | |
| |
| Robartes | Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon, | |
| The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents, | |
| Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty | 35 |
| The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in: | |
| For there’s no human life at the full or the dark. | |
| From the first crescent to the half, the dream | |
| But summons to adventure and the man | |
| Is always happy like a bird or a beast; | 40 |
| But while the moon is rounding towards the full | |
| He follows whatever whim’s most difficult | |
| Among whims not impossible, and though scarred | |
| As with the cat-o’-nine-tails of the mind, | |
| His body moulded from within his body | 45 |
| Grows comelier. Eleven pass, and then | |
| Athenae takes Achilles by the hair, | |
| Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born, | |
| Because the heroes’ crescent is the twelfth. | |
| And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must, | 50 |
| Before the full moon, helpless as a worm. | |
| The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war | |
| In its own being, and when that war’s begun | |
| There is no muscle in the arm; and after | |
| Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon | 55 |
| The soul begins to tremble into stillness, | |
| To die into the labyrinth of itself. | |
| |
| Aherne | Sing out the song; sing to the end, and sing | |
| The strange reward of all that discipline. | |
| |
| Robartes | All thought becomes an image and the soul | 60 |
| Becomes a body: that body and that soul | |
| Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle, | |
| Too lonely for the traffic of the world: | |
| Body and soul cast out and cast away | |
| Beyond the visible world. | 65 |
| |
| Aherne | All dreams of the soul | |
| End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body. | |
| |
| Robartes | Have you not always known it? | |
| |
| Aherne | The song will have it | |
| That those that we have loved got their long fingers | 70 |
| From death, and wounds, or on Sinai’s top, | |
| Or from some bloody whip in their own hands. | |
| They ran from cradle to cradle till at last | |
| Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness | |
| Of body and soul. | 75 |
| |
| Robartes | The lovers’ heart knows that. | |
| |
| Aherne | It must be that the terror in their eyes | |
| Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour | |
| When all is fed with light and heaven is bare. | |
| |
| Robartes | When the moon’s full those creatures of the full | 80 |
| Are met on the waste hills by country men | |
| Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul | |
| Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves, | |
| Caught up in contemplation, the mind’s eye | |
| Fixed upon images that once were thought, | 85 |
| For separate, perfect, and immovable | |
| Images can break the solitude | |
| Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes. | |
| |
|
| And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice | |
| Aherne laughed, thinking of the man within, | 90 |
| His sleepless candle and laborious pen. | |
| |
| Robartes | And after that the crumbling of the moon. | |
| The soul remembering its loneliness | |
| Shudders in many cradles; all is changed, | |
| It would be the World’s servant, and as it serves, | 95 |
| Choosing whatever task’s most difficult | |
| Among tasks not impossible, it takes | |
| Upon the body and upon the soul | |
| The coarseness of the drudge. | |
| |
| Aherne | Before the full | 100 |
| It sought itself and afterwards the world. | |
| |
| Robartes | Because you are forgotten, half out of life, | |
| And never wrote a book your thought is clear. | |
| Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man, | |
| Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn, | 105 |
| Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all | |
| Deformed because there is no deformity | |
| But saves us from a dream. | |
| |
| Aherne | And what of those | |
| That the last servile crescent has set free? | 110 |
| |
| Robartes | Because all dark, like those that are all light, | |
| They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud, | |
| Crying to one another like the bats; | |
| And having no desire they cannot tell | |
| What’s good or bad, or what it is to triumph | 115 |
| At the perfection of one’s own obedience; | |
| And yet they speak what’s blown into the mind; | |
| Deformed beyond deformity, unformed, | |
| Insipid as the dough before it is baked, | |
| They change their bodies at a word. | 120 |
| |
| Aherne | And then? | |
| |
| Robartes | When all the dough has been so kneaded up | |
| That it can take what form cook Nature fancy | |
| The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more. | |
| |
| Aherne | But the escape; the song’s not finished yet. | 125 |
| |
| Robartes | Hunchback and saint and fool are the last crescents. | |
| The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow | |
| Out of the up and down, the wagon wheel | |
| Of beauty’s cruelty and wisdom’s chatter, | |
| Out of that raving tide is drawn betwixt | 130 |
| Deformity of body and of mind. | |
| |
| Aherne | Were not our beds far off I’d ring the bell, | |
| Stand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall | |
| Beside the castle door, where all is stark | |
| Austerity, a place set out for wisdom | 135 |
| That he will never find; I’d play a part; | |
| He would never know me after all these years | |
| But take me for some drunken country man; | |
| I’d stand and mutter there until he caught | |
| ‘Hunchback and saint and fool,’ and that they came | 140 |
| Under the three last crescents of the moon, | |
| And then I’d stagger out. He’d crack his wits | |
| Day after day, yet never find the meaning. | |
| |
|
| And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard | |
| Should be so simple—a bat rose from the hazels | 145 |
| And circled round him with its squeaky cry, | |
| The light in the tower window was put out. | |
