Classic Poem

The Island, and Here

My name, as the title shows,
Is Laura, and hers Francisca.
And my age must be thirty,
As hers must be I should say six,
Judging by and judging by.

I will tell you everything.
On the island of Mallorca
Sometimes I see an English newspaper.
In one I read, a young man questioned
In the private question-corner,
" I want to go away and live abroad
On very, very little a day."
The answer was, " The cheapest climate,
Scenery and food are in Mallorca."
But, Mr. Very Very Little A Day,
I live here, and I ought to know.
This is not heaven, but the smallest earth.
Beyond which comes perhaps bon dia tenga
Or another same fiesta of San Juan,
But never more than what may please
Without dishonouring mortality.
Which is not to buy paradise
Through the low rate of exchange.
Money will buy you only money here,
Another same yourself, unmagicked
By the cheap touch of salvation.

Of course, a lot of people come here,
And Mr. Short at Palma finds them houses.
But there they end and end.
And that is why they like it here:
Wherever the soul gives in to flesh
Without a struggle is home.
But you, I think, did not ask your question
In the homely sense of tiredness.
But enough of you, this is a poem
About how Laura turned into Francisca.
And you come in only to show
Mallorca in this poem is not
A favoured island made for man by God,
But so much godliness as man has
In being faithful to being man.

There are many habitable islands.
To be habitable is an island:
The rest is space, childhood of the mind,
Where keeping house is statecraft:
The habiting mind seems to itself
Tremendous, as a child writes large.
Then comes maturity, and loss of size,
And continents give way to islands,
And keeping house is play —
A small circle of meaning
Within a larger, the larger being
Truth, by which man knows of man.
And so a refuge-island is only
A grinning hollow of sarcasm and despite:
Such is the goatish propaganda
Of uninhabitable Ireland.
England is knowledge's self-doubt:
Whatever lies beyond makes here
An island in a sea of there.
From England sailed shy heroes
To stretch an empire of interrogation
As far as man could think —
Without forgetting the way back to silence.
From Spain tortured grandees of resignation
Sent hope out to die nobly;
Its angry face from God hidden,
The Spanish triumph is a self-damned flesh.

Of islands speaks the Mediterranean.
Precociously the Cretans fashioned
A private idiom of death.
With Semite impartiality the Phoenicians
Mothered the strangers of the little places.
Which Athens taught their several minor prides.
Corsica, man of France, triumphed too well,
By littleness was great, and of greatness, nothing.
Malta, Italy of islands,
Dreaming of greatness won from fate
Only an aged bad temper.
I mention it because they say
It is an island not unlike Mallorca.
And so is one man like another.
Up the slow grade of resemblance creeps
Identity — till the exact image
Is unphenomenal.
Exact Mallorca, least everywhere,
Most earth-like miniature
Of a too heavenly planet:
Here is a day a day, a word a word,
Man only men, and God the future,
Too late a subject for to-day
And better given to to-morrow,
The eternal Sunday.

I got this out of no bazaar of views;
But, looking round for the last day,
I found the first, grown small and final
Against the imagined years
And narrowed into one same previousness.
And what's an end, but honest time
Confessing that it only came before?
Looking around for literal death,
I found such literal life:
Like Deya, built within itself,
Never a step beyond — as the church leads
From Deya hill to Deya down,
The Baptist crying off who would go on
To angelhood and always
Without growing small by death in Deya.

And so we came to Deya,
A village of Mallorca,
The island of an island,
As the bodily look carries a face.
Exact Mallorca, minute Deya,
Finest and only fraction
Of the sole integer.
From here, the first least measure,
Truth has the difference only of more
Between its least and most:
If you have lived a thorough death
And, being dead, know self as truth-same —
However less than truth, yet not less true.
(Less true is difference in life,
Walking the other way, toward fancy
And the opposite islands of nowhere.)

But I think this is enough to show
My poem is not travel whimsy,
Or that mind's masquerade called fiction,
But a poem, that is, a fact
Standing alone, an island,
A little all that more grows
According to the trouble you can take.
For here I tell you, instead of Laura,
The samest least of her, Francisca.
May you, after this briefest day,
Sleep the short sleep and, waking up,
Ask, " Is this not yesterday
When it was to-day — and to-morrow,
The long present instead of night?"