"Orpheus With His Lute": Theme With Variations

“BREATHE! Move again! Awake! Break through
This long pretense of sleep! Weep low
Or laugh, or merely feign to smile;
Whisper small words like ‘love’ and ‘you,'
But stir and come to life again.
Say something, anything. Or listen while
I sing you out of silence, out of pain . . .”

He stopped. No use. He’s said it all before.
Probably better. He had lost the knack
Of making the dry bones of speech cry out,
Shaking the mind with unaccustomed words,
Innocent and clairvoyant . . . He was through.

There was a time when everything stood still
To hear his lightest grace-note. Howling beasts
Gathered around on tiptoe; prowling lions
Forswearing fierceness, purred their ecstasy.
The hen, dreaming of eagles, preened herself And nestled closer to the enraptured fox.
The tyrant vulture and the timid wren
Pressed wing to wing in worship. Nightingales
Improved their coloratura. Tropic trees
And the mountaintops that freeze bowed themselves.
Even the billows shouting from the sea
Hung their great heads in an adoring hush.

But that was long ago. Now all was changed.
The mountains sat in stony unconcern.
The waves had business of their own. The beasts
Had casually deserted him and, worse,
Had all turned critics, while the birds
Were screaming birds of prey. He could not charm
The hungriest sparrow from the nearest bush.
The virtue had gone out of him . . . And yet . . .
There must be ways of winning back again
That magic sleight-of-tongue, the trick of song:
The feet that danced and beat in balanced time,
With all the little echoing bells of rhyme . . .
There must be ways. And he would learn them all;
Learn — by the book — what once he knew by heart;
Learn by example, theory, and rule,
Whatever modern poetry could impart . . .

And so he came to earth, and went to school.
The first course he encountered was a class
In cold anxiety, where sentiment
Had been exchanged for sensibility,
And personal emotion had become
Impersonal detachment. It was chic
To be unmoved, acute and clinical,
To be an oracle as well as wit,
Poet and pedant, erudite buffoon.
Coupling minute precisions out of Pope
With soft-shoe patter straight from vaudeville.
Here the disciples of the modern Muse,
Aggressive children from progressive schools,
Learned how to take a flat banality
And make it sound as baleful as a bomb,
Twisting the ordinary turn of speech
With extra-audenary menace . . . So,
Having observed how it was done, he changed
His pitch and hopefully rephrased his song.

“The breakfast lurks on the table,
The tea conspires in the cup,
The nightmare screams from the headlines,
Get up, my pet, get up.

“Happy and whole in his homburg,
The minister hatches his crime;
The fall-out drifts over Greenland.
It’s time, my pet, it’s time.

“Dripping with ermine and emeralds,
The Truth knows nothing but lies;
Virtue is anyone’s call-girl.
Open, my pet, your eyes.

“Judas comes down the chimney,
As Beelzebub howls in the grate;
O weep for the sleep of the righteous.
Too late, my pet, too late.

“The saint seduces the sinner,
While Eve is instructing the snake.
Love ends in a vicious fermata.
Awake, poor fool, awake.

“Where Midas murders his mistress
In the house that was built by jack,
Mary has lamb for her luncheon,
And white, snow white, is black.

“If hate can he radiant with reason,
And war is a sine qua non,
If evil’s not simply enchanting,
Sleep on, my pet, sleep on.”

No! No! The tune was thin, the tone was false.
The words betrayed his meaning out of shape,
Reducing love to mordant flippancies
And leering fairy tales. It would not do.
He wandered on . . . He found another school . . .
Established in the ruins, here the rats
Nested in hollow statues. Ran and his nymphs
Coupled among tin cans and rusted springs.
Half sordid and half sacrosanct, it was
A school where common sense surrendered to
A dark, uncommon sense of suffering,
Where flagellated flesh not only craved
The anguish of the bone but, mourned by ants,
The slow attrition of the skeleton.
Here words and feelings struggled to attain
Delicate imprecisions of nuance:
Here time and timelessness together stood
At the still center of a wasted world,
Yearning toward death . . . Once more he tried to learn
A newer tone, another attitude.
And thus, in a defunctive sermon, spoke:

“Between the concept and the execution,
After the end, before the beginning,
Between the sinning and the suffering,
Open your dead eyes.

“Can the ivy climb to us here?
The lake dry,
The sky full of fear,
The rock rotten.
Has rain forgotten this place?
Can you remember, can you dare to face
The horror and the glory and the emptiness?

“Between the going and the coming.
Between the absolute and the abstraction,
The last nirvana, infinite inaction.
The boredom of beauty and the beauty of boredom.
Keep your eyes closed.

“Between the doubts and indecisions,
Among the small poetic agonies —
Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen
Mach' ich die kleinen Lieder —
You will confront Priapus at the club
Whispering to Mr. Frazer.
The strumpet Helen’s voice has changed
Because of high fidelity. But where is Faust?
Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.
Ripeness, a bag of withered figs, is all
Included in the dollar table d’hôte;
Desire, a blind man’s mark, the scum of tought,
Is quoted falling on the Stock Exchange;
The carrion crow of Cairo cries ‘Conform!
It’s later than you think! Conform! Conform!'”

All wrong, all wrong — this jangle out of tune
And out of context, a compendium
Of mixed quotations, a small orchestra
Of strident brass and clashing symbols.
Grimly he ventured on a final trial,
A third and last resort, an ultimate style . . .

He found the very place, a School of Schools,
In a mid western grove of Academe,
Half library, half laboratory, where
Strange cultures flourished in the filtered air.
“Poetry should not mean but be,”cried one.
Whereat another scornfully replied,
“A poem lives by infinite meanings; it
Is all things to all readers, a complex
Of ambiguities that glide along
A dozen levels simultaneously.”
“The text is less important than the texture!”
“The logic-leaping metaphor demands
Strictly arranged derangements of the word!”

“The false dawn of appearance drowns
The old, recurrent dream of long delay;
A chaos of improvisation crowns
The arrogant, ignoble day
That crawls away.

“Here, where the incidence of love bisects
The arc of history, is heaped her hair.
And, schooled by all the warring analects,
I learn a style, a savoir-faire
From a despair.”

This was the last! He threw away his notes,
Facing the fact that he no longer was
In fashion. He had lost his following.
Lost her, lost everything except the pain,
The hard compulsion to create . . .
There lay
The still unbroken lute, He took it up.
Tightened the strings, and knew that he must sing
For no reward, no audience, no response,
Only for that last listener, himself.

There was a rustling, then a gentle roar.
A lion arched against him. Singing birds
Cascaded on his shoulders. A great wolf
Offered a trusting paw, curled at his feet.
The forests clapped their hands, the trees bowed down.
And, more than all the miracles, she rose
With reassurance and without surprise,
Meeting his look with rediscovering eyes.