To a Poet

Wayfarer, glorious one,

Heart fiery as a sun, lips stammering prophecies—

That you should pity me is credible, conceivable;

But it is unbelievable that I should pity you.

Yet don’t you think, great one, in all your splendid journeys,

Your combats, your tourneys with this gangrened world of ours,

That there are some vignettes you may have overlooked, have lost,

Since you do not melt your mind’s frost with any red-hot pennies?

Can those stern eyes, where beauty enters throbbing,

Have missed the conductor bobbing like a monkey on the tram?

Have your alert brain’s sentinels been out setting pickets

Against the child chewing tickets, change rolling on the floor;

And factory-girls on the early trains, rough badinage and chaff;

The ceremonial photograph, like a bottle circulating;

And the hordes of relatives, virago-tongued and vicious

(Irony most delicious!) over a ghost’s furniture?

Now yours is the grand power, great for good or evil:

The schoolboy (poor devil!) will be told off to study you.

On hills over the sky you have set your plinths of stone;

You have crushed yourself, alone, in unscented, unstarred valleys.

You have fixed, fired a cresset that will always be alive;

I toil, delve, drive at my ballad-blocks of roughness—

That you should pity me is credible, conceivable;

Exquisitely unbelievable that I should pity you!