Classic and Contemporary Poetry
A COLLEGE BREAKFAST-PARTY, by MARY ANN EVANS Poet's Biography First Line: Young hamlet, not the hesitating dane Last Line: And leave the soul in wider emptiness. Alternate Author Name(s): Eliot, George; Cross, Marian Lewes; Evans, Marian; Ann, Mary Subject(s): College Sports; Food & Eating; Parties; Philosophy & Philosophers; Shakespeare - Hamlet | ||||||||
YOUNG Hamlet, not the hesitating Dane, But one named after him, who lately strove For honors at our English Wittenberg Blond, metaphysical, and sensuous, Questioning all things and yet half convinced Credulity were better; held inert 'Twixt fascinations of all opposites, And half suspecting that the mightiest soul (Perhaps his own?) was union of extremes, Having no choice but choice of everything: As, drinking deep to-day for love of wine, To-morrow half a Brahmin, scorning life As mere illusion, yearning for that True Which has no qualities; another day Finding the fount of grace in sacraments, And purest reflex of the light divine In gem-bossed pyx and broidered chasuble, Resolved to war no stockings and to fast With arms extended, waiting ecstasy; But getting cramps instead, and needing change, A would-be pagan next: Young Hamlet sat A guest with five of somewhat riper age At breakfast with Horatio, a friend With few opinions, but of faithful heart, Quick to detect the fibrous spreading roots Of character that feed men's theories, Yet cloaking weaknesses with charity And ready in all service save rebuke. With ebb of breakfast and the cider-cup Came high debate: the others seated there Were Osric, spinner of fine sentences, A delicate insect creeping over life Feeding on molecules of floral breath, And weaving gossamer to trap the sun; Laertes, ardent, rash, and radical; Discursive Rosencranz, grave Guildenstern, And he for whom the social meal was made The polished priest, a tolerant listener, Disposed to give a hearing to the lost, And breakfast with them ere they went below. From alpine metaphysic glaciers first The talk sprang copious; the themes were old, But so is human breath, so infant eyes, The daily nurslings of creative light. Small words held mighty meanings: Matter, Force, Self, Not-self, Being, Seeming, Space and Time Plebeian toilers on the dusty road Of daily traffic, turned to Genii And cloudy giants darkening sun and moon. Creation was reversed in human talk: None said, "Let Darkness be," but Darkness was; And in it weltered with Teutonic ease, An argumentative Leviathan, Blowing cascades from out his element, The thunderous Rosencranz, till "Truce, I beg!" Said Osric, with nice accent. "I abhor That battling of the ghosts, that strife of terms For utmost lack of color, form, and breath, That tasteless squabbling called Philosophy: As if a blue-winged butterfly afloat For just three days above the Italian fields, Poising in sunshine, fluttering toward its bride, Should fast and speculate, considering What were if it were not? or what now is Instead of that which seems to be itself? Its deepest wisdom surely were to be A sipping, marrying, blue-winged butterfly; Since utmost speculation on itself Were but a three days' living of worse sort A bruising struggle all within the bounds Of butterfly existence." "I protest," Burst in Laertes, "against arguments That start with calling me a butterfly, A bubble, spark, or other metaphor Which carries your conclusions as a phrase In quibbling law will carry property. Put a thin sucker for my human lips Fed at a mother's breast, who now needs food That I will earn for her; put bubbles blown From frothy thinking, for the joy, the love, The wants, the pity, and the fellowship (The ocean deeps I might say, were I bent On bandying metaphors) that make a man Why, rhetoric brings within your easy reach Conclusions worthy of a butterfly. The universe, I hold, is no charade, No acted pun unriddled by a word, Nor pain a decimal diminishing With hocus-pocus of a dot or naught. For those who know it, pain is solely pain: Not any letters of the alphabet Wrought syllogistically pattern-wise, Nor any cluster of fine images. Nor any missing of their figured dance By blundering molecules. Analysis May show you the right physic for the ill, Teaching the molecules to find their dance, Instead of sipping at the heart of flowers. But spare me your analogies, that hold Such insight as the figure of a crow And bar of music put to signify A crowbar." Said the Priest, "There I agree Would add that sacramental grace is grace Which to be known must first be felt, with all The strengthening influxes that come by prayer. I note this passingly would not delay The conversation's tenor, save to hint That taking stand with Rosencranz one sees Final equivalence of all we name Our Good and Ill their difference meanwhile Being inborn prejudice that plumps you down An Ego, brings a weight into your scale Forcing a standard. That resistless weight Obstinate, irremovable by thought, Persisting through disproof, an ache, a need That spaceless stays where sharp analysis Has shown a plenum filled without it what If this, to use your phrase, were just that Being Not looking solely, grasping from the dark, Weighing the difference you call Ego? This Gives you persistence, regulates the flux With strict relation rooted in the All. Who is he of your late philosophers Takes the true name of Being to be Will? I nay, the Church objects naught, is content: Reason has reached its utmost negative, Physic and metaphysic meet in the inane And backward shrink to intense prejudice, Making their absolute and homogene A loaded relative, a choice to be Whatever is supposed: a What is not. The Church demands no more, has standing room And basis for her doctrine: this (no more) That the strong bias which we name the Soul, Though fed and clad by dissoluble waves, Has antecedent quality, and rules By veto or consent the strife of thought, Making arbitrament that we call faith." Here was brief silence, till young Hamlet spoke. "I crave direction, Father, how to know The sign of that imperative whose right To sway my act in face of thronging doubts Were an oracular gem in price beyond Urim and Thummim lost to Israel. That bias of the soul, that conquering die Loaded with golden emphasis of Will How find it where resolve, once made, becomes The rash exclusion of an opposite Which draws the stronger as I turn aloof." "I think I hear a bias in your words," The Priest said mildly "that strong natural bent Which we call hunger. What more positive Than appetite? of spirit or of flesh, I care not 'sense of need' were truer phrase. You hunger for authoritative right, And yet discern no difference of tones, No weight of rod that marks imperial rule? Laertes granting, I will put your case In analogic form: the doctors hold Hunger which gives no relish save caprice That tasting venison fancies mellow pears A symptom of disorder, and prescribe Strict discipline. Were I physician here I would prescribe that exercise of soul Which lies in full obedience: you ask, Obedience to what? The answer lies Within the word itself; for how obey What has no rule, asserts no absolute claim? Take inclination, taste why, that is you, No rule above you. Science, reasoning On nature's order they exist and move Solely by disputation, hold no pledge Of final consequence, but push the swing Where Epicurus and the Stoic sit In endless see-saw. One authority, And only one, says simply this, Obey: Place yourself in that current (test it so!) Of spiritual order where at least Lies promise of a high communion, A Head informing members, Life that breathes With gift of forces over and above The plus of arithmetic interchange. 'The Church too has a body,' you object, 'Can be dissected, put beneath the lens And shown the merest continuity Of all existence else beneath the sun.' I grant you; but the lens will not disprove A present which eludes it. Take your wit, Your highest passion, widest-reaching thought: Show their conditions if you will or can, But though you saw the final atom-dance Making each molecule that stands for sign Of love being present, where is still your love? How measure that, how certify its weight? And so I say, the body of the Church Carries a Presence, promises and gifts Never disproved whose argument is found In lasting failure of the search elsewhere For what it holds to satisfy man's need. But I grow lengthy: my excuse must be Your question, Hamlet, which has probed right through To the pith of our belief. And I have robbed Myself of pleasure as a listener. 'T is noon, I see; and my appointment stands For half-past twelve with Voltimand. Good-by." Brief parting, brief regret sincere, but quenched In fumes of best Havana, which consoles For lack of other certitude. Then said, Mildly sarcastic, quiet Guildenstern: "I marvel how the Father gave new charm To weak conclusions: I was half convinced The poorest reasoner made the finest man, And held his logic lovelier for its limp." "I fain would hear," said Hamlet, "how you find A stronger footing than the Father gave. How base your self-resistance save on faith In some invisible Order, higher Right Than changing impulse. What does Reason bid? To take as fullest rationality What offers best solution: so the Church. Science, detecting hydrogen aflame Outside our firmament, leaves mystery Whole and untouched beyond; nay, in our blood And in the potent atoms of each germ The Secret lives envelops, penetrates Whatever sense perceives or thought divines. Science, whose soul is explanation, halts With hostile front at mystery. The Church Takes mystery as her empire, brings its wealth Of possibility to fill the void 'Twixt contradictions warrants so a faith Defying sense and all its ruthless train Of arrogant 'Therefores.' Science with her lens Dissolves the Forms that made the other half Of all our love, which thenceforth widowed lives To gaze with maniac stare at what is not. The Church explains not, governs feeds resolve By vision fraught with heart-experience And human yearning." "Ay," said Guildenstern, With friendly nod, "the Father, I can see, Has caught you up in his air-chariot. His thought takes rainbow-bridges, out of reach By solid obstacles, evaporates The coarse and common into subtilties, Insists that what is real in the Church Is something out of evidence, and begs (Just in parenthesis) you'll never mind What stares you in the face and bruises you. Why, by his method I could justify Each superstition and each tyranny That ever rode upon the back of man, Pretending fitness for his sole defence Against life's evil. How can aught subsist That holds no theory of gain or good? Despots with terror in their red right hand Must argue good to helpers and themselves, Must let submission hold a core of gain To make their slaves choose life. Their theory, Abstracting inconvenience of racks, Whip-lashes, dragonnades and all things coarse Inherent in the fact or concrete mass, Presents the pure idea utmost good Secured by Order only to be found In strict subordination, hierarchy Of forces where, by nature's law, the strong Has rightful empire, rule of weaker proved Mere dissolution. What can you object? The Inquisition if you turn away From narrow notice how the scent of gold Has guided sense of damning heresy The Inquisition is sublime, is love Hindering the spread of poison in men's souls: The flames are nothing: only smaller pain To hinder greater, or the pain of one To save the many, such as throbs at heart Of every system born into the world. So of the Church as high communion. Of Head with members, fount of spirit force Beyond the calculus, and carrying proof In her sole power to satisfy man's need: That seems ideal truth as clear as lines That, necessary though invisible, trace The balance of the planets and the sun Until I find a hitch in that last claim. 'To satisfy man's need.' Sir, that depends: We settle first the measure of man's need Before we grant capacity to fill. John, James, or Thomas, you may satisfy: But since you choose ideals I demand Your Church shall satisfy ideal man, His utmost reason and his utmost love. And say these rest a-hungered find no scheme Content them both, but hold the world accursed, A Calvary where Reason mocks at Love, And Love forsaken sends out orphan cries Hopeless of answer; still the soul remains Larger, diviner than your half-way Church, Which racks your reason into false consent, And soothes your Love with sops of selfishness." "There I am with you," cried Laertes. "What To me are any dictates, though they came With thunders from the Mount, if still within I see a higher Right, a higher Good Compelling love and worship? Though the earth Held force electric to discern and kill Each thinking rebel what is martyrdom But death-defying utterance of belief, Which being mine remains my truth supreme Though solitary as the throb of pain Lying outside the pulses of the world? Obedience is good: ay, but to what? And for what ends? For say that I rebel Against your rule as devilish, or as rule Of thunder-guiding powers that deny Man's highest benefit: rebellion then Were strict obedience to another rule Which bids me flout your thunder." "Lo you " Said Osric, delicately, "how you come, Laertes mine, with all your warring zeal As Python-slayer of the present age Cleansing all social swamps by darting rays Of dubious doctrine, hot with energy Of private judgment and disgust for doubt To state my thesis, which you most abhor When sung in Daphnis-notes beneath the pines To gentle rush of waters. Your belief In essence what is it but simply Taste? I urge with you exemption from all claims That come from other than my proper will, An Ultimate within to balance yours, A solid meeting you, excluding you, Till you show fuller force by entering My spiritual space and crushing Me To a subordinate complement of You: Such ultimate must stand alike for all. Preach your crusade, then: all will join who like The hurly-burly of aggressive creeds; Still your unpleasant Ought, your itch to choose What grates upon the sense, is simply Taste, Differs, I think, from mine (permit the word, Discussion forces it) in being bad." The tone was too polite to breed offence, Showing a tolerance of what was "bad" Becoming courtiers. Louder Rosencranz Took up the ball with rougher movement, wont To show contempt for doting reasoners Who hugged some reasons with a preference, As warm Laertes did: he gave five puffs Intolerantly sceptical, then said: "Your human good, which you would make supreme, How do you know it? Has it shown its face In adamantine type, with features clear, As this republic, or that monarchy? As federal grouping, or municipal? Equality, or finely shaded lines Of social difference? ecstatic whirl And draught intense of passionate joy and pain, Or sober self-control that starves its youth And lives to wonder what the world calls joy? Is it in sympathy that shares men's pangs, Or in cool brains that can explain them well? Is it in labor or in laziness? In training for the tug of rivalry To be admired, or in the admiring soul? In risk or certitude? In battling rage And hardy challenges of Protean luck, Or in a sleek and rural apathy Full fed with sameness? Pray define your Good Beyond rejection by majority; Next, how it may subsist without the Ill Which seems its only outline. Show a world Of pleasure not resisted; or a world Of pressure equalized, yet various In action formative; for that will serve As illustration of your human good Which at its perfecting (your goal of hope) Will not be straight extinct, or fall to sleep In the deep bosom of the Unchangeable. What will you work for, then, and call it good With full and certain vision good for aught Save partial ends which happen to be yours? How will you get your stringency to bind Thought or desire in demonstrated tracks Which are but waves within a balanced whole? Is 'relative' the magic word that turns Your flux mercurial of good to gold? Why, that analysis at which you rage As anti-social force that sweeps you down The world in one cascade of molecules, Is brother 'relative' and grins at you Like any convict whom you thought to send Outside society, till this enlarged And meant New England and Australia too. The Absolute is your shadow, and the space Which you say might be real were you milled To curves pellicular, the thinnest thin, Equation of no thickness, is still you." "Abstracting all that makes him clubbable," Horatio interposed. But Rosencranz, Deaf as the angry turkey-cock whose ears Are plugged by swollen tissues when he scolds At men's pretensions: "Pooh, your 'Relative' Shuts you in, hopeless, with your progeny As in a Hunger-tower; your social good, Like other deities by turn supreme, Is transient reflex of a prejudice, Anthology of causes and effects To suit the mood of fanatics who lead The mood of tribes or nations. I admit If you could show a sword, nay, chance of sword Hanging conspicuous to their inward eyes With edge so constant threatening as to sway All greed and lust by terror; and a law Clear-writ and proven as the law supreme Which that dread sword enforces then your Right, Duty, or social Good, were it once brought To common measure with the potent law, Would dip the scale, would put unchanging marks Of wisdom or of folly on each deed, And warrant exhortation. Until then, Where is your standard or criterion? 'What always, everywhere, by all men' why, That were but Custom, and your system needs Ideals never yet incorporate, The imminent doom of Custom. Can you find Appeal beyond the sentience in each man? Frighten the blind with scarecrows? raise an awe Of things unseen where appetite commands Chambers of imagery in the soul At all its avenues? You chant your hymns To Evolution, on your altar lay A sacred egg called Progress: have you proved A Best unique where all is relative, And where each change is loss as well as gain? The age of healthy Saurians, well supplied With heat and prey, will balance well enough A human age where maladies are strong And pleasures feeble; wealth a monster gorged 'Mid hungry populations; intellect Aproned in laboratories, bent on proof That this is that and both are good for naught Save feeding error through a weary life; While Art and Poesy struggle like poor ghosts To hinder cock-crow and the dreadful light, Lurking in darkness and the charnel-house, Or like two stalwart graybeards, imbecile With limbs still active, playing at belief, That hunt the slipper, foot-ball, hide-and-seek, Are sweetly merry, donning pinafores And lisping emulously in their speech. O human race! Is this then all thy gain? Working at disproof, playing at belief, Debate on causes, distaste of effects, Power to transmute all elements, and lack Of any power to sway the fatal skill And make thy lot aught else than rigid doom? The Saurians were better. Guildenstern, Pass me the taper. Still the human curse Has mitigation in the best cigars." Then swift Laertes, not without a glare Of leonine wrath: "I thank thee for that word: That one confession, were I Socrates, Should force you onward till you ran your head At your own image flatly gave the lie To all your blasphemy of that human good Which bred and nourished you to sit at ease And learnedly deny it. Say the world Groans ever with the pangs of doubtful births: Say, life's a poor donation at the best Wisdom a yearning after nothingness Nature's great vision and the thrill supreme Of thought-fed passion but a weary play I argue not against you. Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull? If life is worthless to you why, it is. You only know how little love you feel To give you fellowship, how little force Responsive to the quality of things. Then end your life, throw off the unsought yoke. If not if you remain to taste cigars, Choose racy diction, perorate at large With tacit scorn of meaner men who win No wreath or tripos then admit at least A possible Better in the seeds of earth; Acknowledge debt to that laborious life Which, sifting evermore the mingled seeds, Testing the Possible with patient skill, And daring ill in presence of a good For futures to inherit, made your lot One you would choose rather than end it, nay, Rather than, say, some twenty million lots Of fellow-Britons toiling all to make That nation, that community, whereon You feed and thrive and talk philosophy. I am no optimist whose faith must hang On hard pretence that pain is beautiful And agony explained for men at ease By virtue's exercise in pitying it. But this I hold: that he who takes one gift Made for him by the hopeful work of man, Who tastes sweet bread, walks where he will unarmed His shield and warrant the invisible law, Who owns a hearth and household charities, Who clothes his body and his sentient soul With skill and thoughts of men, and yet denies A human good worth toiling for, is cursed With worse negation than the poet feigned In Mephistopheles. The Devil spins His wire-drawn argument against all good With sense of brimstone as his private lot, And never drew a solace from the Earth." Laertes fuming paused, and Guildenstern Took up with cooler skill the fusillade: "I meet your deadliest challenge, Rosencranz: Where get, you say, a binding law, a rule Enforced by sanction, an Ideal throned With thunder in its hand? I answer, there Whence every faith and rule has drawn its force Since human consciousness awaking owned An Outward, whose unconquerable sway Resisted first and then subdued desire By pressure of the dire Impossible Urging to possible ends the active soul And shaping so its terror and its love. Why, you have said it threats and promises Depend on each man's sentience for their force: All sacred rules, imagined or revealed, Can have no form or potency apart From the percipient and emotive mind. God, duty, love, submission, fellowship, Must first be framed in man, as music is, Before they live outside him as a law. And still they grow and shape themselves anew, With fuller concentration in their life Of inward and of outward energies Blending to make the last result called Man, Which means, not this or that philosopher Looking through beauty into blankness, not The swindler who has sent his fruitful lie By the last telegram: it means the tide Of needs reciprocal, toil, trust, and love The surging multitude of human claims Which make "a presence not to be put by" Above the horizon of the general soul. Is inward Reason shrunk to subtleties, And inward wisdom pining passion-starved? The outward Reason has the world in store, Regenerates passion with the stress of want, Regenerates knowledge with discovery, Shows sly rapacious Self a blunderer, Widens dependence, knits the social whole In sensible relation more defined. Do Boards and dirty-handed millionnaires Govern the planetary system? sway The pressure of the Universe? decide That man henceforth shall retrogress to ape, Emptied of every sympathetic thrill The All has wrought in him? dam up henceforth The flood of human claims as private force To turn their wheels and make a private hell For fish-pond to their mercantile domain? What are they but a parasitic growth On the vast real and ideal world Of man and nature blent in one divine? Why, take your closing dirge say evil grows And good is dwindling; science mere decay, Mere dissolution of ideal wholes Which through the ages past alone have made The earth and firmament of human faith; Say, the small arc of Being we call man Is near its mergence, what seems growing life Naught but a hurrying change toward lower types, The ready rankness of degeneracy. Well, they who mourn for the world's dying good May take their common sorrows for a rock, On it erect religion and a church, A worship, rites, and passionate piety The worship of the Best though crucified And God-forsaken in its dying pangs; The sacramental rites of fellowship In common woe; visions that purify Through admiration and despairing love Which keep their spiritual life intact Beneath the murderous clutches of disproof And feed a martyr-strength." "Religion high!" (Rosencranz here) "But with communicants Few as the cedars upon Lebanon A child might count them. What the world demands Is faith coercive of the multitude." "Tush, Guildenstern, you granted him too much," Burst in Laertes; "I will never grant One inch of law to feeble blasphemies Which hold no higher ratio to life Full vigorous human life that peopled earth And wrought and fought and loved and bravely died Than the sick morning glooms of debauchees. Old nations breed old children, wizened babesWhose youth is languid and incredulous, Weary of life without the will to die; Their passions visionary appetites Of bloodless spectres wailing that the world For lack of substance slips from out their grasp; Their thoughts the withered husks of all things dead, Holding no force of germs instinct with life, Which never hesitates but moves and grows. Yet hear them boast in screams their godlike ill, Excess of knowing! Fie on you, Rosencranz! You lend your brains and fine-dividing tongue For bass-notes to this shrivelled crudity, This immature decrepitude that strains To fill our ears and claim the prize of strength For mere unmanliness. Out on them all! Wits, puling minstrels, and philosophers, Who living softly prate of suicide, And suck the commonwealth to feed their ease While they vent epigrams and threnodies, Mocking or wailing all the eager work Which makes that public store whereon they feed. Is wisdom flattened sense and mere distaste? Why, any superstition warm with love, Inspired with purpose, wild with energy That streams resistless through its ready frame, Has more of human truth within its life Than souls that look through color into naught Whose brain, too unimpassioned for delight, Has feeble ticklings of a vanity Which finds the universe beneath its mark, And scorning the blue heavens as merely blue Can only say, 'What then?' pre-eminent In wondrous want of likeness to their kind, Founding that worship of sterility Whose one supreme is vacillating Will Which makes the Light, then says, "'T were better not." Here rash Laertes brought his Handel-strain As of some angry Polypheme, to pause; And Osric, shocked at ardors out of taste, Relieved the audience with a tenor voice And delicate delivery. "For me, I range myself in line with Rosencranz Against all schemes, religious or profane, That flaunt a Good as pretext for a lash To flog us all who have the better taste, Into conformity, requiring me At peril of the thong and sharp disgrace To care how mere Philistines pass their lives; Whether the English pauper-total grows From one to two before the naughts; how far Teuton will outbreed Roman; if the class Of proletaires will make a federal band To bind all Europe and America, Throw, in their wrestling, every government, Snatch the world's purse and keep the guillotine: Or else (admitting these are casualties) Driving my soul with scientific hail That shuts the landscape out with particles; Insisting that the Palingenesis Means telegraphs and measure of the rate At which the stars move nobody knows where. So far, my Rosencranz, we are at one. But not when you blaspheme the life of Art, The sweet perennial youth of Poesy, Which asks no logic but its sensuous growth, No right but loveliness; which fearless strolls Betwixt the burning mountain and the sea, Reckless of earthquake and the lava stream, Filling its hour with beauty. It knows naught Of bitter strife, denial, grim resolve, Sour resignation, busy emphasis Of fresh illusions named the new-born True, Old Error's latest child; but as a lake Images all things, yet within its depths Dreams them all lovelier thrills with sound And makes a harp of plenteous liquid chords So Art or Poesy: we its votaries Are the Olympians, fortunately born From the elemental mixture; 't is our lot To pass more swiftly than the Delian God, But still the earth breaks into flowers for us, And mortal sorrows when they reach our ears Are dying falls to melody divine. Hatred, war, vice, crime, sin, those human storms, Cyclones, floods, what you will outbursts of force Feed art with contrast, give the grander touch To the master's pencil and the poet's song, Serve as Vesuvian fires or navies tossed On yawning waters, which when viewed afar Deepen the calm sublime of those choice souls Who keep the heights of poesy and turn A fleckless mirror to the various world, Giving its many-named and fitful flux An imaged, harmless, spiritual life, With pure selection, native to art's frame, Of beauty only, save its minor scale Of ill and pain to give the ideal joy A keener edge. This is a mongrel globe; All finer being wrought from its coarse earth Is but accepted privilege: what else Your boasted virtue, which proclaims itself A good above the average consciousness? Nature exists by partiality (Each planet's poise must carry two extremes With verging breadths of minor wretchedness): We are her favorites and accept our wings. For your accusal, Rosencranz, that art Shares in the dread and weakness of the time, I hold it null; since art or poesy pure, Being blameless by all standards save her own, Takes no account of modern or antique In morals, science, or philosophy: No dull elenchus makes a yoke for her, Whose law and measure are the sweet consent Of sensibilities that move apart From rise or fall of systems, states or creeds Apart from what Philistines call man's weal." "Ay, we all know those votaries of the Muse Ravished with singing till they quite forgot Their manhood, sang, and gaped, and took no food, Then died of emptiness, and for reward Lived on as grasshoppers" Laertes thus: But then he checked himself as one who feels His muscles dangerous, and Guildenstern Filled up the pause with calmer confidence. "You use your wings, my Osric, poise yourself Safely outside all reach of argument, Then dogmatize at will (a method known To ancient women and philosophers, Nay, to Philistines whom you most abhor); Else, could an arrow reach you, I should ask Whence came taste, beauty, sensibilities Refined to preference infallible? Doubtless, ye're gods these odors ye inhale, A sacrificial scent. But how, I pray, Are odors made, if not by gradual change Of sense or substance? Is your beautiful A seedless, rootless flower, or has it grown With human growth, which means the rising sun Of human struggle, order, knowledge? sense Trained to a fuller record, more exact To truer guidance of each passionate force? Get me your roseate flesh without the blood; Get fine aromas without structure wrought From simpler being into manifold: Then and then only flaunt your Beautiful As what can live apart from thought, creeds, states, Which mean life's structure. Osric, I beseech The infallible should be more catholic Join in a war-dance with the cannibals, Hear Chinese music, love a face tattooed, Give adoration to a pointed skull, And think the Hindu Siva looks divine: 'T is art, 't is poesy. Say, you object: How came you by that lofty dissidence, If not through changes in the social man Widening his consciousness from Here and Now To larger wholes beyond the reach of sense; Controlling to a fuller harmony The thrill of passion and the rule of fact; And paling false ideals in the light Of full-rayed sensibilities which blend Truth and desire? Taste, beauty, what are they But the soul's choice toward perfect bias wrought By finer balance of a fuller growth Sense brought to subtlest metamorphosis Through love, thought, joy the general human store Which grows from all life's functions? As the plant Holds its corolla, purple, delicate, Solely as outflush of that energy Which moves transformingly in root and branch." Guildenstern paused, and Hamlet quivering Since Osric spoke, in transit imminent From catholic striving into laxity, Ventured his word. "Seems to me, Guildenstern, Your argument, though shattering Osric's point That sensibilities can move apart From social order, yet has not annulled His thesis that the life of poesy (Admitting it must grow from out the whole) Has separate functions, a transfigured realm Freed from the rigors of the practical,Where what is hidden from the grosser world Stormed down by roar of engines and the shouts Of eager concourse rises beauteous As voice of water-drops in sapphire caves; A realm where finest spirits have free sway In exquisite selection, uncontrolled By hard material necessity Of cause and consequence. For you will grant The Ideal has discoveries which ask No test, no faith, save that we joy in them: A new-found continent, with spreading lands Where pleasure charters all, where virtue, rank, Use, right, and truth have but one name, Delight. Thus Art's creations, when etherealized To least admixture of the grosser fact Delight may stamp as highest." "Possible!" Said Guildenstern, with touch of weariness, "But then we might dispute of what is gross, What high, what low." "Nay," said Laertes, "ask The mightiest makers who have reigned, still reign Within the ideal realm. See if their thought Be drained of practice and the thick warm blood Of hearts that beat in action various Through the wide drama of the struggling world. Good-by, Horatio." Each now said "Good-by." Such breakfast, such beginning of the day Is more than half the whole. The sun was hot On southward branches of the meadow elms, The shadows slowly farther crept and veered Like changing memories, and Hamlet strolled Alone and dubious on the empurpled path Between the waving grasses of new June Close by the stream where well-compacted boats Were moored or moving with a lazy creak To the soft dip of oars. All sounds were light As tiny silver bells upon the robes Of hovering silence. Birds made twitterings That seemed but Silence' self o'erfull of love. 'T was invitation all to sweet repose; And Hamlet, drowsy with the mingled draughts Of cider and conflicting sentiments, Chose a green couch and watched with half-closed eyes The meadow-road, the stream and dreamy lights, Until they merged themselves in sequence strange With undulating ether, time, the soul, The will supreme, the individual claim, The social Ought, the lyrist's liberty, Democritus, Pythagoras, in talk With Anselm, Darwin, Comte, and Schopenhauer, The poets rising slow from out their tombs Summoned as arbiters that border-world Of dozing, ere the sense is fully locked. And then he dreamed a dream so luminous He woke (he says) convinced; but what it taught Withholds as yet. Perhaps those graver shades Admonished him that visions told in haste Part with their virtues to the squandering lips And leave the soul in wider emptiness. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ELSINORE IN THE LATE ANCIENT AUTUMN by NORMAN DUBIE ON KEAN'S HAMLET by WASHINGTON ALLSTON HAMLET by GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE BALLADS AND CANTILENAS: HAMLET by PAUL FORT HAMLET by NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY LINES IN DEFENCE OF THE STAGE by WILLIAM MCGONAGALL A FAT LADY HEARS SHAKESPEARE AT THE CLUB by GENEVIEVE TAGGARD "THE BATCHELOR'S SOLILOQUY, SELS." by ANONYMOUS GRENADE HORSESHOES by DAVID CHAPMAN BERRY BROTHER AND SISTER by MARY ANN EVANS |
|