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HERE IS MUSIC: 17 by AUSTIN PHILIPS

First Line: THREE MEN IN ME HAVE MADE
Last Line: OF LIFE, ASKS ONLY PEACE, OBLIVION, HERMITAGE.
THREE men in me have made
These songs, my dear of dears:
Three men, in secret tears
Of Gratitude; in heights of Happiness
Too great to tell, too huge to be portrayed;
In depths of Grief, too dark to be displayed. ...
Three several men, each striving to express
All that he finds in Your sweet spiritualness.

The first of these is he,
High on Life's lengthening Hill:
The friend who makes such skill
In living and in learning as long years
Have brought him, Yours; who, in fidelity
To Friendship and his own Philosophy,
Loves without folly, joyfully forbears
From all things alien to the age and death he nears.

The second man is he
In whom You wake and stir
Archaic hours, confer
A recrudescent Youth; conferring, bring
Him back to by-gone days when, ardently,
In fierce, scarce-credible intensity,
He strove as one who, God-inspired, would wring
Fortune from Fate ... poor wretch, strove for vile nidering.

To-day, beholding You,
He looks on, senses, sees
En-fleshed the phantasies
And dreams of Youth, ideals long held dead,
Yet only slumbering, vivified anew,
Re-born, re-quickened, gloriously come true;
Fair Phœnix-offspring from the marriage-bed
Of Hope and Disillusion, ten-times-fifty wed.

He looks on, senses, sees
All until now denied
His sight: the spirit's bride,
The mind's companion, and the body's mate,
Sympathy, Understanding, Passion, Peace,
Immediate and ineffable release
From hampering inhibitions; his whole state
Stirred by that gracious aura which You radiate.

As dust from pile or pyre,
The decades fall away
Even as he looks; his clay
Grows young; his soul knows pristine thirst for strife;
Ardour assumes him; elemental fire
Fills, and informs, him with divine desire
To work, strive, struggle, dedicate his life,
Slave for one long-sought woman ... once, and all-time, his wife.

Such is that second he
Who fought his fearful way
Through mire, morass, who may
Look round, un-shackled, proud to have won free
From stark, suburban prison, to have blent
Emergence with some small accomplishment. ...
And yet remains full conscious, inwardly,
Of having missed Life's loftiest, known but nullity.

Who, wincing 'neath the flail
Of failures which deride
Him, feels that at Your side—
Spurred, strengthened, mellowed by the magic sun
Of such companionship—he may assail
New heights, unclimbed of men, and cannot fail:
But, working for You, will have lived and won ...
And died with joyous sense of something worth-while done.

The third man, thrall to Fate,
Feels saner moments tell
That which he knew too well,
From the first outset, in his midmost heart;
That She in whom he senses his true mate,
The adored, the adorable, is come too late
Within his ken ... so seeks to steal apart,
And drug defeat, devoting drear, drab days to Art.

He sadly, surely knows
That he was born too soon,
That fair, fresh, flaming June—
She of the Summer's prime, the burgeoning bed,
The full-leaved forest and the flower-ful close,
The ripening cornfield and the royal rose—
With mellowing October may not wed,
That false, extravagant hopes, sweet follies must be shed.

So turns, determinedly—
Depressed, despairing, old
In body, and a-cold
In spirit—flies illusion, shuns mirage,
Shamed at the sight of his own vanity,
Accepts the sad, the sunless hours to be;
No more competes; at this penultimate stage
Of Life, asks only Peace, Oblivion, Hermitage.



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