Classic Poem

1

The first showing of herself was foolish,
And to fools: creature of other sense
She first moved into being, singing high
As fools admire, and delivering beauty
Like a three-hour entertainment
In a sweating playhouse, from a draughty stage.
Then they went home, grinning at otherness,
And she to lour in shame, out of which night
She rose unseen, absent in counted presence:
The one more wanting from the swollen streets
And overpeopled books and commonrooms.
And first she was a fool astounding fools,
Who gaped a wonder that forgot itself
So soon their jaws snapped shut on the next meal.
And then she called against herself so other,
The words drooping soft until alone she was,
Whispering, " She whom they did not see though saw
Myself now am, hidden all away in her
Inward from her confiding mouth and face
To deep discretion, this other-person mind."

2

Here of too sudden being she made a patience
And bided in herself, from her flesh far
By days of outer damage that she felt not,
Yet learned of body and of pain from.
Here she grew dead, like a shaped no-one wandered
Among the shapeless someones of a past
That could prediction of her only argue
By the slow logic of time-making fear.
She grew secret, her body told not of her.
Invisibly she spoke, mutely she walked —
Known of but unknown, an imminence deferred.
In this pale state she had prediction of self.
In this pale year one had close panic of her
Who had been dead as many times before
As hope of her refused all other hope.
And he was dead greatly, he lived and knew her.

3

Now following fails, and she now never was,
And he who reached her side alive, a tale.
Nor any more in that once foolish world
Does aught lack or a chair or thought seem empty.
It is a world that was and leads not elsewhere.
Following fails. If she now where he found her
An earthly voice and posture by his side seems,
Then are they still not joined, not yet that world is
Where she the world, and he inhabiting
Like peace unto himself, no more to wait
And change and wait and change, till dead enough.
A world of death after a world of time comes,
But history goes no further than history —
The final scene reads dim, its sense senseless.
And mythically she haunts, a proven truth
So long she is no measured, proven seeming,
But, soon as real, to vanish of being real,
And beyond passion as beyond seeming dwell.
For they who loved and reasoned long and fine
Meant only to contrive with shortest arts
An afterwards to hold to-morrow off —
As a far-fancied god protects from fancy.
And if she came she went, and gave them back
Their faith, a legal gospel like false oaths
Adhered to with the loyalty of words
That do not pledge the mind to believe itself.