The Tower
I
WHAT shall I do with this absurdity -
O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature,
Decrepit age that has beeo me
As to a dogs tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible -
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulbens back
And had the livelong summer day to spend.
It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
be tent with argument and deal
In abstract things; or be derided by
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
II
I pace upotlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;
And send imagination forth
Uhe days deing beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from arees,
For I would ask a question of them all.
Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once
When every silver dlestick or sce
Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine.
A serving-man, that could divine
That most respected ladys every wish,
Ran and with the garden shears
Clipped an i farmers ears
And brought them in a little covered dish.
Some few remembered still when I was young
A peasant girl ended by a Song,
Whod lived somewhere upon that rocky place,
And praised the colour of her face,
And had the greater joy in praising her,
Remembering that, if walked she there,
Farmers jostled at the fair
So great a glory did the song fer.
Aain men, being maddened by those rhymes,
Or else by toasting her a score of times,
Rose from the table and declared it right
To test their fancy by their sight;
But they mistook the brightness of the moon
For the prosaic light of day -
Music had driven their wits astray -
And one was drowned in the great bog of e.
Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have sidered it, I find
That nothing strahe tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen has all livis betrayed.
O may the moon and sunlight seem
One iricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.
And I myself created Hanrahan
And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
From somewhere in the neighb cottages.
Caught by an old mans juggleries
He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro
And had but broken knees for hire
And horrible splendour of desire;
I thought it all out twenty years ago:
Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;
And when that a ruffians turn was on
He so bewitched the cards under his thumb
That all but the one card became
A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
And that he ged into a hare.
Hanrahan rose in frenzy there
And followed up those baying creatures towards -
O towards I have fotten what - enough!
I must recall a man that her love
Nor musior an enemys clipped ear
Could, he was so harried, cheer;
A figure that has grown so fabulous
Theres not a neighbour left to say
When he finished his dogs day:
An a bankrupt master of this house.
Before that ruin came, for turies,
Rough men-at