The Man against the Sky | Page 9

sees here to-day;?Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit?But we mark how he sees in everything?A law that, given we flout it once too often,?Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads.?To me it looks as if the power that made him,?For fear of giving all things to one creature,?Left out the first, -- faith, innocence, illusion,?Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam, --?And thereby, for his too consuming vision,?Empowered him out of nature; though to see him,?You'd never guess what's going on inside him.?He'll break out some day like a keg of ale?With too much independent frenzy in it;?And all for cellaring what he knows won't keep,?And what he'd best forget -- but that he can't.?You'll have it, and have more than I'm foretelling;?And there'll be such a roaring at the Globe?As never stunned the bleeding gladiators.?He'll have to change the color of its hair?A bit, for now he calls it Cleopatra.?Black hair would never do for Cleopatra.
But you and I are not yet two old women,?And you're a man of office. What he does?Is more to you than how it is he does it, --?And that's what the Lord God has never told him.?They work together, and the Devil helps 'em;?They do it of a morning, or if not,?They do it of a night; in which event?He's peevish of a morning. He seems old;?He's not the proper stomach or the sleep --?And they're two sovran agents to conserve him?Against the fiery art that has no mercy?But what's in that prodigious grand new House.?I gather something happening in his boyhood?Fulfilled him with a boy's determination?To make all Stratford 'ware of him. Well, well,?I hope at last he'll have his joy of it,?And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves,?And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover,?Be less than hell to his attendant ears.?Oh, past a doubt we'll all go down to see him.
He may be wise. With London two days off,?Down there some wind of heaven may yet revive him;?But there's no quickening breath from anywhere?Shall make of him again the poised young faun?From Warwickshire, who'd made, it seems, already?A legend of himself before I came?To blink before the last of his first lightning.?Whatever there be, they'll be no more of that;?The coming on of his old monster Time?Has made him a still man; and he has dreams?Were fair to think on once, and all found hollow.?He knows how much of what men paint themselves?Would blister in the light of what they are;?He sees how much of what was great now shares?An eminence transformed and ordinary;?He knows too much of what the world has hushed?In others, to be loud now for himself;?He knows now at what height low enemies?May reach his heart, and high friends let him fall;?But what not even such as he may know?Bedevils him the worst: his lark may sing?At heaven's gate how he will, and for as long?As joy may listen; but HE sees no gate,?Save one whereat the spent clay waits a little?Before the churchyard has it, and the worm.?Not long ago, late in an afternoon,?I came on him unseen down Lambeth way,?And on my life I was afear'd of him:?He gloomed and mumbled like a soul from Tophet,?His hands behind him and his head bent solemn.?"What is it now," said I, -- "another woman?"?That made him sorry for me, and he smiled.?"No, Ben," he mused; "it's Nothing. It's all Nothing.?We come, we go; and when we're done, we're done;?Spiders and flies -- we're mostly one or t'other --?We come, we go; and when we're done, we're done."?"By God, you sing that song as if you knew it!"?Said I, by way of cheering him; "what ails ye?"?"I think I must have come down here to think,"?Says he to that, and pulls his little beard;?"Your fly will serve as well as anybody,?And what's his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies,?And in his fly's mind has a brave appearance;?And then your spider gets him in her net,?And eats him out, and hangs him up to dry.?That's Nature, the kind mother of us all.?And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom,?And where's your spider? And that's Nature, also.?It's Nature, and it's Nothing. It's all Nothing.?It's all a world where bugs and emperors?Go singularly back to the same dust,?Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars?That sang together, Ben, will sing the same?Old stave to-morrow."
When he talks like that,?There's nothing for a human man to do?But lead him to some grateful nook like this?Where we be now, and there to make him drink.?He'll drink, for love of me, and then be sick;?A sad sign always in a man of parts,?And always very ominous. The great?Should be as large in liquor as in love, --?And our great friend is not so large in