The Tower

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    <strong>The Tower</strong>

    I

    WHAT shall I do with this absurdity -

    O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature,

    Decrepit age that has beeo me

    As to a dogs tail?

    Never had I more

    Excited, passionate, fantastical

    Imagination, nor an ear and eye

    That more expected the impossible -

    No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,

    Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulbens back

    And had the livelong summer day to spend.

    It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

    Choose Plato and Plotin<mark>.</mark>us for a friend

    Until imagination, ear and eye,

    be tent with argument and deal

    In abstract things; or be derided by

    A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

    II

    I pace upotlements and stare

    On the foundations of a house, or where

    Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;

    And send imagination forth

    Uhe days deing beam, and call

    Images and memories

    From ruin or from arees,

    For I would ask a question of them all.

    Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once

    When every silver dlestick or sce

    Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine.

    A serving-man, that could divine

    That most respected ladys every wish,

    Ran and with the garden shears

    Clipped an i farmers e<big></big>ars

    And brought them in a little covered dish.

    Some few remembered still when I was young

    A peasant girl c<mark>藏书网</mark>ommended by a Song,

    Whod lived somewhe<dfn>藏书网</dfn>re upon that rocky place,

    And praised the colour of her face,

    And had the greater joy in praising her,

    Remembering that, if walked she there,

    Farmers jostled at the fair

    So great a glory did the song fer.

    Aain men, being maddened by those rhymes,

    Or else by toasting her a score of times,

    Rose from the table and declared it right

    To test their fancy by their sight;

    But they mistook the brightness of the moon

    For the prosaic light of day -

    Music had driven their wits astray -

    And one was drowned in the great bog of e.

    Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;

    Yet, now I have sidered it, I find

    That nothing strahe tragedy began

    With Homer that was a blind man,

    And Helen has all livis betrayed.

    O may the moon and sunlight seem

    One iricable beam,

    For if I triumph I must make men mad.

    And I myself created Hanrahan

    And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn

    From somewhere in the neighb cottages.

    Caught by an old mans juggleries

    He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro

    And had but broken knees for hire

    And horrible splendour of desire;

    I thought it all out twenty years ago:

    Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;

    And when that a ruffians turn was on

    He so bewitched the cards under his thumb

    That all but the one card became

    A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,

    And that he ged into a hare.

    Hanrahan rose in frenzy there

    And followed up those baying creatures towards -

    O towards I have fotten what - enough!

    I must recall a man that her love

    Nor musior an enemys clipped ear

    Could, he was so harried, cheer;

    A figure that has grown so fabulous

    Theres not a neighbour left to say

    When he finished his dogs day:

    An a bankrupt master of this house.

    Before that ruin came, for turies,

    Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees

    Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,

    Aai-arms there were

    Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,

    e with loud cry and panting breast

    To break upon a sleepers rest

    While their great wooden dice beat on the board.

    As I would question all, e all who ;

    e old, ous. half-mounted man;

    And briys blind rambling celebrant;

    The red man the juggler sent

    Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,

    Gifted with so fine an ear;

    The man drowned in a bogs mire,

    When mog Muses chose the try wench.

    Did all old men and women, rid poor,

    Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,

    Whether in public or i rage

    As I do now against old age?

    But I have found an answer in those eyes

    That are impatient to be gone;

    Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,

    For I need all his mighty memories.

    Old lecher with a love on every wind,

    Bring up out of that deep sidering mind

    All that you have discovered in the grave,

    For it is certain that you have

    Reed up every unforeknown, unseeing

    plunge, lured by a softening eye,

    Or by a touch or a sigh,

    Into the labyrinth of anothers being;

    Does the imaginatiohe most

    Upon a woman won or woman lost?

    If on the lost, admit you turned aside

    From a great labyrinth out of pride,

    Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

    Or anything called sce;

    And that if memory recur, the suns

    Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

    III

    It is time that I wrote my will;

    I choose upstanding men

    That climb the streams until

    The fountain leap, and at dawn

    Drop their cast at the side

    Of dripping stone; I declare

    They shall i my pride,

    The pride of people that were

    Bouher to Cause nor to State.

    her to slaves that were spat on,

    Nor to the tyrants that spat,

    The people of Burke and of Grattan

    That gave, though free to refuse -

    pride, like that of the morn,

    When the headlong light is loose,

    Or that of the fabulous horn,

    Or that of the sudden shower

    When all streams are dry,

    Or that of the hour

    When the swan must fix his eye

    Upon a fading gleam,

    Float out upon a long

    Last reach of glittering stream

    And there sing his last song.

    And I declare my faith:

    I mock plotinus thought

    And cry in platos teeth,

    Death and life were not

    Till man made up the whole,

    Made lock, stod barrel

    Out of his bitter soul,

    Aye, sun and moon and star, all,

    And further add to that

    That, being dead, we rise,

    Dream and so create

    Translunar paradise.

    I have prepared my peace

    With learalian things

    And the proud stones of Greece,

    Poets imaginings

    And memories of love,

    Memories of the words of women,

    All those things whereof

    Man makes a superhuman,

    Mirror-resembling dream.

    As at the loophole there

    The daws chatter and scream,

    And drop twigs layer upon layer.

    When they have mounted up,

    The mother bird will rest

    On their hollow top,

    And so warm her wild .

    I leave both faith and pride

    To young upstanding men

    Climbing the mountain-side,

    That under bursting dawn

    They may drop a fly;

    Being of that metal made

    Till it was broken by

    This sedentary trade.

    Now shall I make my soul,

    pelling it to study

    In a learned school

    Till the wreck of body,

    Slow decay of blood,

    Testy delirium

    Or dull decrepitude,

    Or what worse evil e -

    The death of friends, or death

    Of every brilliant eye

    That made a cat the breath - .

    Seem but the clouds of the sky

    When the horizon fades;

    Or a birds sleepy cry

    Among the deepening shades.

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