THE SPIRIT ARIEL
(After reading Shakespeare’s Tempest)
Once long ago somewhere you freed him
with that same jolt with which as a young man
you tore yourself toward greatness, away from all regard.
He became willing, and ever since he serves,
poised for freedom after every deed.
And half imperiously, half almost ashamed,
you inform him that for this and that
you still require him, and, ah, must tell again
that story of how you helped him. And yet you feel, yourself,
how everything that you keep back through him
is missing from the air. How sweet and almost tempting:
to let him go—, and then, no longer conjuring,
enrolled in fate like all the others,
to know that his light friendship now,
without any strain, nowhere any obligation,
an adjunct to this breathing’s space,
is at work in the element, unthinkingly.
Henceforth dependent, no longer with that gift
to shape the dull mouth into the call
at which he came. Powerless, aging, poor,
yet breathing him like incomprehensibly far-flung
scattered fragrance by which alone the invisible
is made complete. Smiling, that you could
summon him this way, in such great dealings
so easily at home. Perhaps weeping too,
when you remember how it loved and longed
to leave you, both, always the same desire.
(Have I let it go? Now this man frightens me,
who’s becoming Duke again. How gently
he draws the cord through his head and hangs
himself up with the other figures and begs
henceforth the play’s indulgence … What an epilogue
to mastery achieved. Mere naked standing-there
with nothing but his strength: “which is most faint.”)
Ronda, January–February 1913