The Man against the Sky | Page 9

of all his easy
distances
Than one another's noise and clap-your-shoulder.
But
think you not, my friend, he'd never talk!
Talk? He was eldritch at it;
and we listened --
Thereby acquiring much we knew before
About
ourselves, and hitherto had held
Irrelevant, or not prime to the
purpose.
And there were some, of course, and there be now,

Disordered and reduced amazedly
To resignation by the mystic seal


Of young finality the gods had laid
On everything that made him a
young demon;
And one or two shot looks at him already
As he had
been their executioner;
And once or twice he was, not knowing it, --

Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay
And saying nothing. . . . Yet,
for all his engines,
You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon
Who
strut and sun themselves and see around 'em
A world made out of
more that has a reason
Than his, I swear, that he 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