Classic Poem

I am an old and solitary man,
And now at set of sun in Sicily
I sit down in the middle of this plain,
Which drives between the mountains and the sea
Its blank of nature. If a traveller came,
Seeing my bare bald skull and my still brows
And massive features coloured to a stone—
The tragic mask of a humanity
Whose part is played to an end,—he might mistake me
For some god Terminus set on these flats,
Or broken marble Faunus. Let it be.
Life has ebbed from me—I am on dry ground—
All sounds of life I held so thunderous sweet
Shade off to silence—all the perfect shapes,
Born of perception and men's images,
Which thronged against the outer rim of earth
And hung with floating faces over it,
Grow dim and dimmer—all the motions drawn
From Beauty in action which spun audibly
My brain round in a rapture, have grown still.
There's a gap 'twixt me and the life once mine,
Now others' and not mine, which now roars off
In gradual declination—till at last
I hear it in the distance droning small
Like a bee at sunset. Ay, and that bee's hum,
The buzzing fly, and mouthing of the grass
Cropped slowly near me by some straying sheep
Are strange to me with life—and separate from me
The outside of my being—I myself
Grow to the silence, fasten to the calm
Of inorganic nature . . . sky and rocks—
I shall pass on into their unity
When dying down into impersonal dusk.
Ah ha—these flats are wide!
The prophecy which said the house would fall
And thereby crush me, must bring down the sky,
The only roof above me where I sit,
Or ere it prove its oracle today.
Stand fast, ye pillars of the constant Heavens,
As Life doth in me—I who did not die
That day in Athens when the people's scorn
Hissed toward the sun as if to darken it,
Because my thoughts burned too much for the eyes
Over my head, because I spoke my Greek
Too deep down in my soul to suit their ears.
Who did not die to see the solemn vests
Of my white chorus round the thymele
Flutter like doves, and sweep back like a cloud
Before the shrill-lipped people . . . but stood calm
And cold, and felt the theatre wax hot
With mouthing whispers . . . the man Aeschylus
Is grey, I fancy—and his wrinkles ridge
The smoothest of his phrases—or the times
Have grown too polished for this old rough work—
We have no Sphinxes in the Parthenon
Nor any flints at Delphos—or, forsooth,
I think the Sphinxes wrote this Attic Greek—
Our Sophocles hath something more than this
Cast out on—their smile—I would not die
At this time by the crushing of a house
Who lived that Day out . . . I would go to death
With voluntary and majestic steps,
Jove thundering on the right hand. Let it be.

I am an old and solitary man.
Mine eyes feel dimly out the setting sun
Which drops its great red fruit of bitterness
Today as other days, as every day,
Within the patient waters. What do I say?
I whistle out my scorn against the sun
Who knelt his trilogy, morn, noon and night,
And set this tragic world against the sun—
Forgive me, great Apollo.—Bitter fruit
I think we never found that holy sun
Or ere with conjurations of our hands
Drove up the saltness of our hearts to it
A blessed fruit, a full Hesperian fruit
Which the fair sisters with their starry eyes
Did warm to scarlet bloom. O holy sun,
My eyes are weak and cannot hold thee round!
But in my large soul there is room for thee—
All human wrongs and shames cast out from it,—
And I invite thee, sun, to sphere thyself
In my large soul, and let my thoughts in white
Keep chorus round thy glory. Oh, the days
In which I sat upon Hymettus hill,
Ilissus seeming louder: and the groves
Of blessed olive, thinking of their use,
A little tunicked child, and felt my thoughts
Rise past the golden bees against thy face,
Great sun upon the sea. The City lay
Beneath me like an eaglet in an egg,
The beak and claws shut whitely up in calm—
And calm were the great waters—and the hills
Holding at arm's length their unmolten snows
Plunged in the light of Heaven, which trickled back
On all sides, a libation to the world.
There I sat, a child
Half hidden in purple thyme, with knees drawn up
By clasping of my little arms, and cheek
Laid slant across them with obtruded nose,
And full eyes gazing . . . ay, my eyes climbed up
Against the heated metal of thy shield,
Till their persistent look clove through the fire
And struck it into manyfolded fires,
And opened out the secret of the night,
Hid in the day-source Darkness mixed with light.
Then shot innumerous arrows in my eyes
From all sides of the Heavens—so blinding me—
As countless as the norland snowflakes fall
Before the north winds—rapid, wonderful,
Some shafts as bright as sunrays nine times drawn
Through the heart of the sun—some black as night in Hell—
All mixed, sharp, driven against me! And as I gazed
(For I gazed still) I saw the sea and earth
Leap up as wounded by the innumerous shafts,
And hurry round, and whirl into a blot
Across which evermore fell thick the shafts
As norland snow falls thick before the wind,
Until the northmen at the cavern's mouth
Can see no pinetree through. I could see naught,
No earth, no sea, no sky, no sun itself,
Only that arrowy rush of black and white
Across a surf of rainbows infinite
Drove piercing and blinding and astonishing;
And through it all Homerus, the blind man,
Did chant his vowelled music in my brain.
And then it was revealed, it was revealed,
That I should be a priest of the Unseen,
And build a bridge of sounds across the straight
From Heaven to earth, whence all the Gods might walk
Nor bend it with their soles.
And then I saw the Gods tread past me slow
From out the portals of the hungry dark,
And each one as he past breathed in my face
And made me greater. First old Saturn came,
Blind with eternal watches . . . calm and blind . . .
Then Zeus . . . his eagle blinking on his wrist
To his hands' rod of fires: in thunder-rolls
He glode on grandly—while the troop of Prayers
Buzzed dimly in the shadow of his light
With murmurous sounds, and poor beseeching tears.
And Neptune with beard and locks drawn straight
As seaweed—ay, and Pluto with his Dark
Cutting the dark as Lightning cuts the sun
Made individual by intensity.
And then Apollo trenching on the dusk
With a white glory, while the lute he bore
Struck on the air