Hypocrite Auteur

mon semblable, mon frère

(1)

Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction

In that perspective of the action

Which pictures us inhabiting the end

Of everything with death for only friend.

Not that we love death,

Not truly, not the fluttering breath,

The obscene shudder of the finished act—

What the doe feels when the ultimate fact

Tears at her bowels with its jaws.

Our taste is for the opulent pause

Before the end comes. If the end is certain

All of us are players at the final curtain:

All of us, silence for a time deferred,

Find time before us for one sad last word.

Victim, rebel, convert, stoic—

Every role but the heroic—

We turn our tragic faces to the stalls

To wince our moment till the curtain falls.

(2)

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

An age becomes an age, all else beside,

When sensuous poets in their pride invent

Emblems for the soul’s consent

That speak the meanings men will never know

But man-imagined images can show:

It perishes when those images, though seen,

No longer mean.

(3)

A world was ended when the womb

Where girl held God became the tomb

Where God lies buried in a man:

Botticelli’s image neither speaks nor can

To our kind. His star-guided stranger

Teaches no longer, by the child, the manger,

The meaning of the beckoning skies.

Sophocles, when his reverent actors rise

To play the king with bleeding eyes,

No longer shows us on the stage advance

God’s purpose in the terrible fatality of chance.

No woman living, when the girl and swan

Embrace in verses, feels upon

Her breast the awful thunder of that breast

Where God, made beast, is by the blood confessed.

Empty as conch shell by the waters cast

The metaphor still sounds but cannot tell,

And we, like parasite crabs, put on the shell

And drag it at the sea’s edge up and down.

This is the destiny we say we own.

(4)

But are we sure

The age that dies upon its metaphor

Among these Roman heads, these mediaeval towers,

Is ours?—

Or ours the ending of that story?

The meanings in a man that quarry

Images from blinded eyes

And white birds and the turning skies

To make a world of were not spent with these

Abandoned presences.

The journey of our history has not ceased:

Earth turns us still toward the rising east,

The metaphor still struggles in the stone,

The allegory of the flesh and bone

Still stares into the summer grass

That is its glass,

The ignorant blood

Still knocks at silence to be understood.

Poets, deserted by the world before,

Turn round into the actual air:

Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!