Among School Children

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning,A kind old nun in a white hood replies;The children learn to cipher and to sing,To study reading-books and history,To cut and sew, be neat in everythingIn the best modern way--the children’s eyesIn momentary wonder stare uponA sixty year old smiling public man.

I dream of a Ledæan body, bentAbove a sinking fire, a tale that sheTold of a harsh reproof, or trivial eventThat changed some childish day to tragedy--Told, and it seemed that our two natures blentInto a sphere from youthful sympathy,Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

And thinking of that fit of grief or rageI look upon one child or t’other thereAnd wonder if she stood so at that age--For even daughters of the swan can shareSomething of every paddler’s heritage--And had that colour upon cheek or hairAnd thereupon my heart is driven wild:She stands before me as a living child.

Her present image floats in to the mind--Did quattrocento finger fashion itHollow of cheek as though it drank the windAnd took a mass of shadows for its meat?And I though never of Ledæan kindHad pretty plumage once--enough of that,Better to smile on all that smile, and showThere is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lapHoney of generation had betrayed,And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escapeAs recollection or the drug decide,Would think her son, did she but see that shapeWith sixty or more winters on its head,A compensation for the pang of his birth,Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Plato thought nature but a spume that playsUpon a ghostly paradigm of things;Solider Aristotle played the tawsUpon the bottom of a king of kings;World-famous golden-thighed PythagorasFingered upon a fiddle stick or stringsWhat a star sang and careless Muses heard:Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

Both nuns and mothers worship images,But those the candles light are not as thoseThat animate a mother’s reveries,But keep a marble or a bronze repose.And yet they too break hearts--O PresencesThat passion, piety or affection knows,And that all heavenly glory symbolise--O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul,Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Come praise Colonus’ horses and come praiseThe wine dark of the wood’s intricacies,The nightingale that deafens daylight there,If daylight ever visit where,Unvisited by tempest or by sun,Immortal ladies tread the groundDizzy with harmonious sound,Semele’s lad a gay companion.

And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrivesThe self-sown, self-begotten shape that givesAthenian intellect its mastery,Even the grey-leaved olive treeMiracle-bred out of the living stone;Nor accident of peace nor warShall wither that old marvel, forThe great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.

Who comes into this country, and has comeWhere golden crocus and narcissus bloom,Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughterAnd beauty-drunken by the waterGlittering among grey-leaved olive trees,Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;Who finds abounding CephisusHas found the loveliest spectacle there is.

Because this country has a pious mindAnd so remembers that when all mankindBut trod the road, or paddled by the shore,Poseidon gave it bit and oar,Every Colonus lad or lass discoursesOf that oar and of that bit;Summer and winter, day and night,Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.