Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO A PUBLISHER, by CHARLES WILLIAMS


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO A PUBLISHER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: When the divine john out of heaven, great sir
Last Line: The city in great stillness is withdrawn.
Subject(s): Business; Publishing; Businessmen; Businesswomen; Publishers


WHEN the divine John out of heaven, great sir,
Saw the Free City over earth expand,
Lighting the shadows of the things that were,
And all that here was soured or fell to waste
In winds unmanageable, bringing to bland
Maturity and seasonable taste:

Therein twelve guilds he saw, the twelve great wards,
Twelve principles of being, twelve clear gates
Each to some mystery none else affords,
Each with its fair of high solemnity
Whereat with show and feast it celebrates
Its past eleven moons of industry:

Farmers who long with vigil tend the soil,
Sowing divinity and reaping it,
And in due harvest carry home their spoil,
With song and merriment accomplishing
The heavenly year, and with new-conscious wit
That Corpus Christi fully hallowing;

Another day the bold discoverers,
Heroes and saints, since heaven itself is dim
With distance and with innocent danger stirs
Their hopes, come riding inland to address
The gains of their devotion unto him
Who touched the bottom of the bottomless.

But O what dawn, sir, shall behold our state,
Our carnival, our triumph, our good cheer,
When through the streets from our in-pouring gate,
Under observant galleries everywhere,
We range the City, and at last draw near
The dais and the high mayoral chair.

Company there by company shall pass by,
Each with its tossing banner,—and our own,
Not least in that exalted pageantry,
Bright with its golden, legend, Dominus
Illuminatio, and the triple crown,
And you, and I perchance; and over us

Shall all the songs who here on earth were books,
Whom we, according to our wealth, made free,
Flutter like cupids, and with gentle looks
Present us to their lord and principal,
Good craftsmen, prudent in our mystery,
Not slothful here at task, not slow at call.

Around that seat throng the high Presences,
The Archangelical Letters, who first bore
The separating Word in their degrees:
They chief who when the Unnameable was named
Grew to the boundary of Space, the Four
Who are the walls wherein the whole is framed.

And all the sounds who serve man's tyranny,
Misshapen, broken, running to and fro
Upon our meanest business, we shall see,
Attending on the happy silent Word,
Whom here we hardly did as footboys know,
Nor save for our own needs could they be heard;

The drudges of Desire, the scavengers
Of metropolitan Possession, pale
Sons of poor tailors, cooks, and labourers;
Lean words that found so little happiness,—
Vagrants of talk or styed up in the jail
Of pedants' lore,—and never knew success

Until some fortunate poet drew them forth
Out of that misery, charged them with power,
Re-bathed them in their ancient pristine worth,
And through his meditation they again
Escaped to their own land, whom in his hour
They sing to have lived on earth nowise in vain.

They have their life, but at what cost of death,
Out of such dark impassioned moment born
As when young Browning met Elizabeth,
Or, turned from watching on Niphates' head,
Milton lamented blindness, or forlorn
Catullus mourned above his brother dead!

And we who could not so refresh our night,
Who are no Shakespeares, nor no Campions we,
Yet shall go up among them, nor the flight
Of those deft wings shall there neglect our love,
Who gave them once a second liberty,—
The poets gave them heaven, we earth to rove.

They, of earth's fame still shyly covetous,
And still with nothing but their love for fee,
Petitionary came, and found with us
Shelter and shipping for what voyages
To ports of mind beyond the public sea
They risked their hopes on and their health's increase.

Patrons and printers, what we had we gave,
Blessing them with devotion and desire
Meetly to serve,—Caesar, Southampton, grave
Linnell and bright Lorenzo, many a king
For some sole gift of lodging or attire
Remembered at his dynasty's sunsetting;

And many a copying monk who in his cell
With gayer colours touched a poet's line
For love's sake than a preacher's, drawing well
Plated Aeneas helming forth the fleet
Of Trojans from coifed Dido, with the fine
Walls of a Gothic Carthage at her feet.

And many a darker mind who in his day
Set up the types with weary eyes and slow
And heavily for food re-told the lay
Of the spent Mariner or of Isabel,
But in his heart felt light from that strange woe
Trouble the common thought he knew so well.

These shall be counted, these with lifted brows,
Bright with the virtue of that ancient care,
Shall pass; and all the princes of our house
Who mightily did once themselves expend
Upon creation—Taylor who loved Clare
And Keats, and Moseley who was Milton's friend;

And many a learnèd critic of our guild
Who kept in secret purity his mind,
Watching the stars' discretion,—when to build
A house of reputation for some child
Of verse or prose, and when to turn unkind;
And now walks bravely, free and undefiled.

And as each soul or song one moment gains,
Fronting Phoebean deity face to face,
His central pause, the universal strains
Prolong his note around in harmony,
And the whole City, bowing towards his place,
Reverberates his name eternally.

For there in turn republican all are
Our masters, and we theirs; so interchange
The hierarchical degrees afar;
Waxing and waning, dwindled or increased,
In order as in light, all spirits range
The whole ascent, now topmost and now least.

Heaven shall not lack interpretation; all
The heavens, by our great mystery and art,
Shall become common and reciprocal;
Yea, without us eleven guilds should be
But a dumb joy, we are their singing part,
Their publication and epiphany.

And if at all in any than the rest
More of Immanuel's delight can be,
Are not the Carpenters his friends confessed
And we his later fellows,—the two trades
He followed, through his thirty years and three,
Of wood and words,—nor his skill ever fades.

Shall he forget the intimate sweet word
Breathed to his Mother when they needed wine,
Or the sharp edge of thought which like a sword
Destroyed Apollyon, his own prayer, or that
Seraph who ran before him for a sign
And is for ever the Magnificat?

But O than these a gift more marvellous
He to our great assembly doth commit,—
His rich significant silence; unto us
He is the depth where music doth rejoice:
Let the rest hear his praise and cherish it,
We are the praise he speaks, we are his voice.

Only at last, when is no more to tell,
And our disparted union dies away,
Lost in our solitudes innumerable,—
As some sole thrush who, amid garden trees
In the last light of the now sunless day,
To one whom evening from his labour frees,

Brings peace and joy and news of love to be,
So to each spirit a remote sweet call
Marks closer stirrings of divinity
Than any high publicity of dawn,
The stars shine in a farther heaven, and all
The City in great stillness is withdrawn.





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