| IF you could crowd them into forty lines! | |
| Yes; you can do it, once you get a start; | |
| All that you want is waiting in your head, | |
For long-ago you’ve learnt it off by heart.
. . . . | |
| Begin: your mind’s the room where you have slept, | 5 |
| (Don’t pause for rhymes), till twilight woke you early. | |
| The window stands wide-open, as it stood | |
| When tree-tops loomed enchanted for a child | |
| Hearing the dawn’s first thrushes through the wood | |
| Warbling (you know the words) serene and wild. | 10 |
| |
| You’ve said it all before: you dreamed of Death, | |
| A dim Apollo in the bird-voiced breeze | |
| That drifts across the morning veiled with showers, | |
| While golden weather shines among dark trees. | |
| |
| You’ve got your limitations; let them sing, | 15 |
| And all your life will waken with a cry: | |
| Why should you halt when rapture’s on the wing | |
| And you’ve no limit but the cloud-flocked sky?... | |
| |
| But some chap shouts, ‘Here, stop it; that’s been done!’— | |
| As God might holloa to the rising sun, | 20 |
| And then relent, because the glorying rays | |
| Remind Him of green-glinting Eden days, | |
| And Adam’s trustful eyes as he looks up | |
| From carving eagles on his beechwood cup. | |
| |
| Young Adam knew his job; he could condense | 25 |
| Life to an eagle from the unknown immense.... | |
| Go on, whoever you are; your lines can be | |
| A whisper in the music from the weirs | |
| Of song that plunge and tumble toward the sea | |
That is the uncharted mercy of our tears.
. . . . | 30 |
| I told you it was easy! ... Words are fools | |
| Who follow blindly, once they get a lead. | |
| But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools | |
| Of quiet; seldom-seen: and all you need | |
| Is just that flash of joy above your dream. | 35 |
| So, when those forty platitudes are done, | |
| You’ll hear a bird-note calling from the stream | |
| That wandered through your childhood; and the sun | |
| Will strike the old flaming wonder from the waters.... | |
| And there’ll be forty lines not yet begun. | 40 |