Classic and Contemporary Poetry
DEDICATIONS AND INSCRIPTIONS: 6. GRUACH, by GORDON BOTTOMLEY Poet's Biography First Line: Now, when my life is more than half consumed Last Line: The duty that I offer, I too your friend. Subject(s): Writing & Writers | ||||||||
Dedication to C.H.S. and C.S.R. Now, when my life is more than half consumed, And my yet steady flame gathers its force More to aspire before the vague, last flare (That lightens nothing) gutters in the night-wind, Upon the midway ridge of my short days I turn; I would not know what is to come, Down the far slope of the withdrawing wave; I would remain at this conspiring height, Whose upward motion seemed my very own, and keep, Keep mine the swift discoveries of life, The passionate, the unexpected moments That now as I look back are all I have, All I have longed for, all I have to lose, All, all I shall regret when I must leave them. And first, after the daily use of love That is not to be told, the common joy Of life shared with the natural, earth-born forces, I think of him who from Italian seed Was born an English man, him who renewed By moody English ways, at English tension, The lost Italian vision, the passionate Vitality of art more rich than life, More real than the day's reality. Before I knew his name and his great acts Of true creation done on God's behalf, Within himself the assurance of a God, I lived in the stale darkness of my kind; And it was his sole deed that I have known The power of loveliness, the power of truth, And of imagination that concentres Life into more than one life ever gave. By nameless lovers, lovers with great names, By fabulous ladies dreamed and almost seen, By Dante's lost love Beatrice and his own More wonderful and more desirable Lost love Elizabeth, created once For him, and once by him in recollection; And by his rarer light; I learned to live. The first amazement as of a spirit seen, When in the arts that man has perfected Beauty is known, is not maintained. The past Must be resumed in each of us, to each Deliver its attainment and its hope; But every man to his own generation Nearer approaches than to father or child, And apprehends more intimately by it The reality of vision and life; and it More certainly divines the truth of him: And so, when I had turned the last bright page Of that dead painter of a keener life, And felt that the dark mirror of his vision Was broken, and knew I should not see again Any new shape of that mysterious beauty (Which by a heart-ache still brings back my youth), I kindled with more life because I came On the same miracle of enhanced life Continued and renewed in acts of yours. Upon the Dial of the vanished Vale Were counted chosen fortunate hours alone; And there began the invention and the mood That by the shapes of colour and air and light Has made a life men might begin to-day, Yet fit for a lovelier earth that is to be, Out of the England that is here and now -- A region better than dreams, a dawn-lit state, Wherein the daily Greece Theocritus Through his half-open door in the same way Shews us is mingled with succeeding life, Siena, Avalon, and the Western place Where Deirdre learned to move and look at men, And with the garden of living ladies where A silvery bearer of a cyclamen Looked at her painter and shall be remembered With the Gioconda; and in this state I found Assurance that romance is wisdom and truth. And in those vanished hours of the rich Vale One in whose birth England and Italy A second time had kissed was also known; One who received my first enchanter's force Of vision to create a keener life; In whom the knowledge of materials Leads to design as form leads into colour. Wherever human days and acts have burned By breeding and great race to salient height Of suffering or rapture or quivering Domination they are subject to his mind: He has made manifest the shape of Silence: By beings that never were, centaur and sphinx, He has made clear the composition of life, The nature of vitality: and by him I have understood that I desire from art And from creation not repeated things Of every day, not the mean content Or discontent of average helpless souls, Not passionate abstraction of loveliness, But unmatched moments and exceptional deeds And all that cannot happen every day And rare experience of earth's chosen men In which I cannot, by my intermitting And narrow powers, share unless they are held Sublimated and embodied in beauty. Dear Masters, in the acknowledgement of debt There may be grace; but not enough for payment. I write your names before this meditation On an old theme, a birthright of our race, Because I have put therein all that is mine; And so I give it to you, as I would give All that is mine to you, recognisance Of what I owe and have no means to pay. You love the arts so well that you preserve, Within your treasure-house that seems to rise In clarity and in tranquillity Above the impermanence of time, true works That still are less than those you do yourselves: Content me by receiving this among them For your own sake and that of certain dead -- And, most, for the two friends of Paragon Who sought perfection and achieved far more; And by my poem's admittance recognise The duty that I offer, I too your friend. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE CELL, SELECTION by LYN HEJINIAN OXOTA: A SHORT RUSSIAN NOVEL: CHAPTER 126: THE DOUBTING MAN by LYN HEJINIAN WAKING THE MORNING DREAMLESS AFTER LONG SLEEP by JANE HIRSHFIELD COMPULSIVE QUALIFICATIONS by RICHARD HOWARD DEUTSCH DURCH FREUD by RANDALL JARRELL LET THEM ALONE by ROBINSON JEFFERS ON BUILDING WITH STONE by ROBINSON JEFFERS |
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