If you could crowd them into forty lines!
Yes; you can do it, once you get a start;
All that you want is waiting in your head,
For long-ago youve learnt it off by heart.
. . . .
Begin: your minds the room where you have slept,
(Dont pause for rhymes), till twilight woke you early.
The window stands wide-open, as it stood
When tree-tops loomed enchanted for a child
Hearing the dawns first thrushes through the wood
Warbling (you know the words) serene and wild.
Youve said it all before: you dreamed of Death,
A dim Apollo in the bird-voiced breeze
That drifts across the morning veiled with showers,
While golden weather shines among dark trees.
Youve got your limitations; let them sing,
And all your life will waken with a cry:
Why should you halt when raptures on the wing
And youve no limit but the cloud-flocked sky?...
But some chap shouts, Here, stop it; thats been done!
As God might holloa to the rising sun,
And then relent, because the glorying rays
Remind Him of green-glinting Eden days,
And Adams trustful eyes as he looks up
From carving eagles on his beechwood cup.
Young Adam knew his job; he could condense
Life to an eagle from the unknown immense....
Go on, whoever you are; your lines can be
A whisper in the music from the weirs
Of song that plunge and tumble toward the sea
That is the uncharted mercy of our tears.
. . . .
I told you it was easy! ... Words are fools
Who follow blindly, once they get a lead.
But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools
Of quiet; seldom-seen: and all you need
Is just that flash of joy above your dream.
So, when those forty platitudes are done,
Youll hear a bird-note calling from the stream
That wandered through your childhood; and the sun
Will strike the old flaming wonder from the waters....
And therell be forty lines not yet begun.
