In evening’s limpid air,What time the dew’s soothingsUnto the earth downpour,Invisibly and unheard—For tender shoe-gear wearThe soothing dews, like all that’s kind-gentle—:Bethinkst thou then, bethinkst thou, burning heart,How once thou thirstedestFor heaven’s kindly teardrops and dew’s down-droppings,All singed and weary thirstedest,What time on yellow grass-pathwaysWicked, occidental sunny glancesThrough sombre trees about thee sported,Blindingly sunny glow-glances, gladly-hurting?
“Of TRUTH the wooer? Thou?”—so taunted they—“Nay! Merely poet!A brute insidious, plundering, grovelling,That aye must lie,That wittingly, wilfully, aye must lie:For booty lusting,Motley masked,Self-hidden, shrouded,Himself his booty—HE—of truth the wooer?Nay! Mere fool! Mere poet!Just motley speaking,From mask of fool confusedly shouting,Circumambling on fabricated word-bridges,On motley rainbow-arches,‘Twixt the spurious heavenly,And spurious earthly,Round us roving, round us soaring,—MERE FOOL! MERE POET!
HE—of truth the wooer?Not still, stiff, smooth and cold,Become an image,A godlike statue,Set up in front of temples,As a God’s own door-guard:Nay! hostile to all such truthfulness-statues,In every desert homelier than at temples,With cattish wantonness,Through every window leapingQuickly into chances,Every wild forest a-sniffing,Greedily-longingly, sniffing,That thou, in wild forests,’Mong the motley-speckled fierce creatures,Shouldest rove, sinful-sound and fine-coloured,With longing lips smacking,Blessedly mocking, blessedly hellish, blessedly bloodthirsty,Robbing, skulking, lying—roving:—
Or unto eagles like which fixedly,Long adown the precipice look,Adown THEIR precipice:—Oh, how they whirl down now,Thereunder, therein,To ever deeper profoundness whirling!—Then,Sudden,With aim aright,With quivering flight,On LAMBKINS pouncing,Headlong down, sore-hungry,For lambkins longing,Fierce ’gainst all lamb-spirits,Furious-fierce ’gainst all that lookSheeplike, or lambeyed, or crisp-woolly,—Grey, with lambsheep kindliness!
Even thus,Eaglelike, pantherlike,Are the poet’s desires,Are THINE OWN desires ‘neath a thousand guises,Thou fool! Thou poet!Thou who all mankind viewedst—So God, as sheep—:The God TO REND within mankind,As the sheep in mankind,And in rending LAUGHING—
THAT, THAT is thine own blessedness!Of a panther and eagle—blessedness!Of a poet and fool—the blessedness!—