22
Transitional Poem
Was he to trip the shambling rhetoricOf laws and lions: yet abstract turned the tablesAnd his mind, almost, with a whiff of airClothed first in a woman and after in a nightmare.
She next, sorrow's familiar, who turnedHer darkness to our light; that "brazen leech"Alleviating the vain cosmic itchWith fact coated in formulæ lest it burnedOur tongue. She shall have portion in my praise,And live in me, not memory, for always.
Last the tow-haired poet, never doneWith cutting and planing some new gnomic propTo jack his all too stable universe up:—Conduct's Old Dobbin, thought's chameleon.Single mind copes with split intelligence,Breeding a piebald strain of truth and nonsense.
These have I loved and chosen, once being sureSome spacious vision waved upon their eyesThat troubles not the common register;And love them still, knowing it otherwise.
Knowing they held no mastership in wisdomOr wit save by certificate of my love,I have found out a better way to praise them—Nestor shall die and let Patroclus live.
