Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 7

points him on
his way; and this
Fallopius sits in the mid-heart of me,
Because he
keeps his eye upon the goal,
Cuts a straight furrow to the end in view,

Cares not who oped the fountain by the way,
But drinks to draw

fresh courage for his journey.
That was the lesson that Ignatius
taught--
The one I might have learned from him, but would not--

That we are but stray atoms on the wind,
A dancing transiency of
summer eves,
Till we become one with our purpose, merged
In that
vast effort of the race which makes
Mortality immortal.
"He that loseth
His life shall find it": so the Scripture runs.
But I so
hugged the fleeting self in me,
So loved the lovely perishable hours,

So kissed myself to death upon their lips,
That on one pyre we
perished in the end--
A grimmer bonfire than the Church e'er lit!

Yet all was well--or seemed so--till I heard
That younger voice, an
echo of my own,
And, like a wanderer turning to his home,
Who
finds another on the hearth, and learns,
Half-dazed, that other is his
actual self
In name and claim, as the whole parish swears,
So
strangely, suddenly, stood dispossessed
Of that same self I had sold
all to keep,
A baffled ghost that none would see or hear!
"Vesalius?
Who's Vesalius? This Fallopius
It is who dragged the Galen-idol
down,
Who rent the veil of flesh and forced a way
Into the secret
fortalice of life"--
Yet it was I that bore the brunt of it!
Well, better so! Better awake and live
My last brief moment as the
man I was,
Than lapse from life's long lethargy to death
Without
one conscious interval. At least
I repossess my past, am once again

No courtier med'cining the whims of kings
In muffled
palace-chambers, but the free
Friendless Vesalius, with his back to
the wall
And all the world against him. O, for that
Best gift of all,
Fallopius, take my thanks--
That, and much more. At first, when
Padua wrote:
"Master, Fallopius dead, resume again

The chair even
he could not completely fill,
And see what usury age shall take of
youth
In honours forfeited"--why, just at first,
I was quite simply
credulously glad
To think the old life stood ajar for me,
Like a fond
woman's unforgetting heart.
But now that death waylays me--now I
know
This isle is the circumference of my days,
And I shall die

here in a little while--
So also best, Fallopius!
For I see
The gods may give anew, but not restore;
And though I
think that, in my chair again,
I might have argued my supplanters
wrong
In this or that--this Cesalpinus, say,
With all his hot-foot
blundering in the dark,
Fabricius, with his over-cautious clutch
On
Galen (systole and diastole
Of Truth's mysterious heart!)--yet, other
ways,
It may be that this dying serves the cause.
For Truth stays not
to build her monument
For this or that co-operating hand,
But props
it with her servants' failures--nay,
Cements its courses with their
blood and brains,
A living substance that shall clinch her walls

Against the assaults of time. Already, see,
Her scaffold rises on my
hidden toil,
I but the accepted premiss whence must spring
The airy
structure of her argument;
Nor could the bricks it rests on serve to
build
The crowning finials. I abide her law:
A different substance
for a different end--
Content to know I hold the building up;

Though men, agape at dome and pinnacles,
Guess not, the whole
must crumble like a dream
But for that buried labour underneath.

Yet, Padua, I had still my word to say!
Let others say it!--Ah, but will
they guess
Just the one word--? Nay, Truth is many-tongued.
What
one man failed to speak, another finds
Another word for. May not all
converge
In some vast utterance, of which you and I,
Fallopius,
were but halting syllables?
So knowledge come, no matter how it
comes!
No matter whence the light falls, so it fall!
Truth's way, not
mine--that I, whose service failed
In action, yet may make amends in
praise.
Fabricius, Cesalpinus, say your word,
Not yours, or mine,
but Truth's, as you receive it!
You miss a point I saw? See others,
then!
Misread my meaning? Yet expound your own!
Obscure one
space I cleared? The sky is wide,
And you may yet uncover other
stars.
For thus I read the meaning of this end:
There are two ways of
spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
I let
my wick burn out--there yet remains
To spread an answering surface
to the flame
That others kindle.

Turn me in my bed.
The window darkens as the hours swing round;

But yonder, look, the other casement glows!
Let me face westward
as my sun goes down.
MARGARET OF CORTONA
FRA PAOLO, since they say the end is near,
And you of all men
have the gentlest eyes,
Most like our father Francis; since you know

How I have toiled and prayed and scourged and striven,
Mothered
the orphan, waked beside the sick,
Gone empty that mine enemy
might eat,
Given bread for stones in famine years, and channelled

With vigilant knees the pavement of this cell,
Till I constrained the
Christ upon the wall
To bend His thorn-crowned Head in mute
forgiveness . . .
Three times He bowed it . . . (but the