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THE QUEST. 1. The Door. 2. The Preparations. 3. The Crossroads. 4. The Pilgrim. 5. The City. 6. The First Temptation. 7. The Second Temptation
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THE QUEST
1. The Door
Out of it steps the future of the poor,
Enigmas, executioners and rules,
Her Majesty in a bad temper or
The red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.
Great person eye it in the twilight for
A past it might so carelessly let in,
A widow with a missionary grin,
The foaming inundation at a roar.
We pile our all against it when afraid,
And beat upon its panels when we die:
By happening to be open once, it made
Enormous Alice see a wonderland
That waited for her in sunshine, and,
Simply by being tiny, made her cry.
2. The Preparations
All had been ordered weeks before the start
From the best firms at such work; instruments
To take the measure of all queer events,
And drugs to move the bowels or the heart.
A watch, of course, to watch impatience fly
Lamps for the dark and shades against the sun;
Foreboding, too, insisted on a gun
And colored beads to soothe a savage eye.
In the theory they were sound on Expectation
Had there been situations to be in;
Unluckily they were their situation:
One should not give a poisoner medicine,
A conjurer fine apparatus, nor
A rifle to a melancholic bore.
3. The Crossroads
The friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
The empty junction glitters in the sun.
So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell,
O places of decision and farewell,
To what dishonor all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated, his salvation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?
All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for. Yet
Who would complete without extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?
4. The Pilgrim
No windows in his suburb lights that bedroom where
A little fever heard large afternoons at play:
His meadows multiply; that mill, though, is not there
Which went on grinding at the back of love all day.
Nor all his weeping ways through weary wastes have found
The castle where his Greater Hallows are interned;
For broken bridges halt him, and dark thickets round
Some ruin where an evil heritage was burned.
Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
All institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
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He'd tell the truth, for which he thinks himself too young,
That everywhere on the horizon of his sigh
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.
5. The City
In villages from which their childhood's came
Seeking Necessity, they had been taught
Necessity by nature is the same,
No matter how or by whom it be sought.
The city, though, assumed no such belief,
But welcomed each as if he came alone,
The nature of Necessity like grief
Exactly corresponding to his own.
And offered them so many, every one
Found some temptation fit to govern him;
And settled down to master the whole craft
Of being nobody; sat in the sun
During the lunch-hour round the fountain rim;
And watched the country kids arrive, and laughed.
6. The First Temptation
Ashamed to be the darling of his grief
He joined a gang of rowdy stories where
His gift for magic quickly made him chief
Of all these boyish powers of the air;
Who turned his hungers into Roman food,
The town's asymmetry into a park;
All hours took taxis; any solitude
Became his flattered duchess in the dark.
But if he wished for anything less grand,
The nights came padding after him like wild
Beasts that meant harm, and all the doors cried Thief;
And when Truth met him and put out her hand,
He clung in panic to his tall belief
And shrank away like an ill-treated child.
7. The Second Temptation
The library annoyed him with its look
Of calm belief in being really there;
He threw away a rival's silly book,
And clattered panting up the spiral stair.
Swaying upon the parapet he cried:
" O Uncreated Nothing, set me free
Now let Thy perfect be identified,
Unending passion of the Night, with Thee. "
And his long suffering flesh, that all the time
Had felt the simple cravings of the stone
And hoped to be rewarded for her climb,
Took it to be a promise when he spoke
That now at last she would be left alone,
And plunged into the college quad, and broke.
8. The Third Temptation
He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say;
Reopened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey.
And came reluctantly to his conclusion:
" All the arm-chair philosophers are false;
To love another adds to the confusion;
The song of pity is the Devil's Waltz. "
And bowed to fate and was successful so
That soon he was the king of all the creatures:
Yet, shaking in an autumn nightmare saw,
Approaching down a ruined corridor,
A figure with his own distorted features
That wept, and grew enormous, and cried Woe.
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