Her Friends Bring Her a Christmas Tree

Pardon, great enemy,Without an angry thoughtWe've carried in our tree,And here and there have boughtTill all the boughs are gay,And she may look from the bedOn pretty things that mayPlease a fantastic head.Give her a little grace,What if a laughing eyeHave looked into your face--It is about to die.

On the grey sand beside the shallow streamUnder your old wind-beaten tower, where stillA lamp burns on beside the open bookThat Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moonAnd though you have passed the best of life still traceEnthralled by the unconquerable delusionMagical shapes.

That is our modern hope and by its lightWe have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mindAnd lost the old nonchalance of the hand;Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brushWe are but critics, or but half create,Timid, entangled, empty and abashedLacking the countenance of our friends.

And yetThe chief imagination of ChristendomDante Alighieri so utterly found himselfThat he has made that hollow face of hisMore plain to the mind's eye than any faceBut that of Christ.

And did he find himself,Or was the hunger that had made it hollowA hunger for the apple on the boughMost out of reach? and is that spectral imageThe man that Lapo and that Guido knew?I think he fashioned from his oppositeAn image that might have been a stony face,Staring upon a bedouin's horse-hair roofFrom doored and windowed cliff, or half upturnedAmong the coarse grass and the camel dung.He set his chisel to the hardest stone.Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,Derided and deriding, driven outTo climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,He found the unpersuadable justice, he foundThe most exalted lady loved by a man.

Yet surely there are men who have made their artOut of no tragic war, lovers of life,Impulsive men that look for happinessAnd sing when they have found it.

No, not sing,For those that love the world serve it in action,Grow rich, popular and full of influence,And should they paint or write still it is action:The struggle of the fly in marmalade.The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,The sentimentalist himself; while artIs but a vision of reality.What portion in the world can the artist haveWho has awakened from the common dreamBut dissipation and despair?

His art is happy but who knows his mind?I see a schoolboy when I think of him,With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,For certainly he sank into his graveHis senses and his heart unsatisfied,And made--being poor, ailing and ignorant,Shut out from all the luxury of the world,The coarse-bred son of a livery stable-keeper--Luxuriant song.

Why should you leave the lampBurning alone beside an open book,And trace these characters upon the sands;A style is found by sedentary toilAnd by the imitation of great masters.

Because I seek an image, not a book.Those men that in their writings are most wiseOwn nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.I call to the mysterious one who yetShall walk the wet sands by the edge of the streamAnd look most like me, being indeed my double,And prove of all imaginable thingsThe most unlike, being my anti-self,And standing by these characters discloseAll that I seek; and whisper it as thoughHe were afraid the birds, who cry aloudTheir momentary cries before it is dawn,Would carry it away to blasphemous men.