The Man against the Sky | Page 8

Aristotle
knows,
And you mine that I don't know Aristotle."
He's all at odds
with all the unities,
And what's yet worse, it doesn't seem to matter;

He treads along through Time's old wilderness
As if the tramp of all
the centuries
Had left no roads -- and there are none, for him;
He
doesn't see them, even with those eyes, --
And that's a pity, or I say it
is.
Accordingly we have him as we have him --
Going his way, the
way that he goes best,
A pleasant animal with no great noise
Or
nonsense anywhere to set him off --
Save only divers and inclement
devils
Have made of late his heart their dwelling place.
A flame
half ready to fly out sometimes
At some annoyance may be fanned up
in him,
But soon it falls, and when it falls goes out;
He knows how
little room there is in there
For crude and futile animosities,

And
how much for the joy of being whole,
And how much for long sorrow
and old pain.
On our side there are some who may be given
To
grow old wondering what he thinks of us
And some above us, who
are, in his eyes,
Above himself, -- and that's quite right and English.

Yet here we smile, or disappoint the gods
Who made it so: the
gods have always eyes
To see men scratch; and they see one down

here
Who itches, manor-bitten to the bone,
Albeit he knows himself
-- yes, yes, he knows --
The lord of more than England and of more

Than all the seas of England in all time
Shall ever wash. D'ye wonder
that I laugh?
He sees me, and he doesn't seem to care;
And why the
devil should he? I can't tell you.
I'll meet him out alone of a bright Sunday,
Trim, rather spruce, and
quite the gentleman.
"What ho, my lord!" say I. He doesn't hear me;

Wherefore I have to pause and look at him.
He's not enormous, but
one looks at him.
A little on the round if you insist,
For now, God
save the mark, he's growing old;
He's five and forty, and to hear him
talk
These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add
More years to
that. He's old enough to be
The father of a world, and so he is.
"Ben,
you're a scholar, what's the time of day?"
Says he; and there shines
out of him again
An aged light that has no age or station --
The
mystery that's his -- a mischievous
Half-mad serenity that laughs at
fame
For being won so easy, and at friends
Who laugh at him for
what he wants the most,
And for his dukedom down in Warwickshire;
--
By which you see we're all a little jealous. . . .
Poor Greene! I fear
the color of his name
Was even as that of his ascending soul;
And
he was one where there are many others, --
Some scrivening to the
end against their fate,
Their puppets all in ink and all to die there;

And some with hands that once would shade an eye
That scanned
Euripides and Aeschylus
Will reach by this time for a pot-house mop

To slush their first and last of royalties.
Poor devils! and they all
play to his hand;
For so it was in Athens and old Rome.
But that's
not here or there; I've wandered off.
Greene does it, or I'm careful.
Where's that boy?
Yes, he'll go back to Stratford. And we'll miss him?
Dear sir, there'll
be no London here without him.
We'll all be riding, one of these fine
days,
Down there to see him -- and his wife won't like us;
And then
we'll think of what he never said
Of women -- which, if taken all in

all
With what he did say, would buy many horses.
Though
nowadays he's not so much for women:
"So few of them," he says,
"are worth the guessing."
But there's a work at work when he says
that,
And while he says it one feels in the air
A deal of
circumambient hocus-pocus.
They've had him dancing till his toes
were tender,
And he can feel 'em now, come chilly rains.
There's no
long cry for going into it,
However, and we don't know much about it.

The Fitton thing was worst of all, I fancy;
And you in Stratford,
like most here in London,
Have more now in the `Sonnets' than you
paid for;
He's put her there with all her poison on,
To make a
singing fiction of a shadow
That's in his life a fact, and always will be.

But she's no care of ours, though Time, I fear,
Will have a more
reverberant ado
About her than about another one
Who seems to
have decoyed him, married him,
And sent him scuttling on his way to
London, --
With much already learned, and more to learn,
And
more to follow. Lord! how I see him now,
Pretending, maybe trying,
to be like us.
Whatever he may have meant, we never had him;
He
failed us, or escaped, or what you will, --
And there was that about
him (God knows what, --
We'd flayed another had he tried it on us)

That made as many of us as had wits
More fond