To Eleonora Duse
1923
If you believed my words,
O tragic, incommunicable lady,
Would they lure you for an instant
From your long, rapt contemplation
Of the sunset-tinted clouds
Lowering in grim and huddled spendour
Over the broken turrets of your ruined sorrows?
Dead to the sting of anguish,
The misery that you ache no more
Is aching so preponderant and huge
You walk within it as an atmosphere
And breathe its bitterness like some gaunt poison
Easing you into numbness
Even of its slow insidious advance.
Where grief has watched
Sits now the ghost of grief.
Where tenderness once held out arms to gather
A universe's loneliness,
Reigns now a weariness of feeling,
A kindliness too spent to give itself,
To smile less calmly than a sculptured saint
Enduring anthems in an incensed niche.
The small dried cones of my fardel of years
Make a poor faggot to light before you,
And yet if you believed them wood not wax
Might not the little raw flame of them
Warm you to a single throb of your lost life?
I see you there before me,
Distant as the shattered past, the shapeless future.
The sprig of your sowing withers in my hands,
Your remoteness is too vast to cherish it.
See, I please it where your somnambulistic feet
May tread upon it
Crushing its fragrance to play round your dreams
I could give much,
Give back what you will not believe your own,
Give laughter, tears.
I am not poor in such,
Richer than you are now, perhaps.
You put me by
Gently, as something in your path
Which, scarcely seeing, yet you brush aside.
You hurt less in the days of your revolt
Than in this quietude of charity.
The sight of you is piercing as a cry,
Your loveliness betrays my eyes to tears,
They smart in falling.
I am no hero-worshipper,
Yet for your sake I long to babble prayers
And overdo myself in services.
Is this not love, then?
My I not write myself disciple, follower?
Unworthy, doubtless, but authentic grain
Sprung from your scattered seed?
Yet you smile and say:
" Of course, it is not true. "
If this be not truth,
Then truth and I have never made a company.
You want no service, no compassion, no refreshment.
Tranquillity you think you have, or call it so,
I call it poison dripped from traitorous urns.
You pass me like a legend sprayed with flowers,
The legend of my youth, and now hence-forward
Of my age.
Pass, lady,
To whom I can give nothing, nothing.
Yet here again I say it,
With the doggedness of custom grown inveterate:
What you gave I give back again and shall,
Along the smooth years where you wander now,
Perfectly heedless of your heedlessness.
Truth is a brazen thing, and I,
Banging against the brass of utter fact,
Do make perhaps a horrid din
To your peace-longing ears.
So be it, I am silent,
But still here, believed or not,
A chance creation not at all desired,
Yet so existing while our double names
Shall carry any meaning to men's minds.
If you believed my words,
O tragic, incommunicable lady,
Would they lure you for an instant
From your long, rapt contemplation
Of the sunset-tinted clouds
Lowering in grim and huddled spendour
Over the broken turrets of your ruined sorrows?
Dead to the sting of anguish,
The misery that you ache no more
Is aching so preponderant and huge
You walk within it as an atmosphere
And breathe its bitterness like some gaunt poison
Easing you into numbness
Even of its slow insidious advance.
Where grief has watched
Sits now the ghost of grief.
Where tenderness once held out arms to gather
A universe's loneliness,
Reigns now a weariness of feeling,
A kindliness too spent to give itself,
To smile less calmly than a sculptured saint
Enduring anthems in an incensed niche.
The small dried cones of my fardel of years
Make a poor faggot to light before you,
And yet if you believed them wood not wax
Might not the little raw flame of them
Warm you to a single throb of your lost life?
I see you there before me,
Distant as the shattered past, the shapeless future.
The sprig of your sowing withers in my hands,
Your remoteness is too vast to cherish it.
See, I please it where your somnambulistic feet
May tread upon it
Crushing its fragrance to play round your dreams
I could give much,
Give back what you will not believe your own,
Give laughter, tears.
I am not poor in such,
Richer than you are now, perhaps.
You put me by
Gently, as something in your path
Which, scarcely seeing, yet you brush aside.
You hurt less in the days of your revolt
Than in this quietude of charity.
The sight of you is piercing as a cry,
Your loveliness betrays my eyes to tears,
They smart in falling.
I am no hero-worshipper,
Yet for your sake I long to babble prayers
And overdo myself in services.
Is this not love, then?
My I not write myself disciple, follower?
Unworthy, doubtless, but authentic grain
Sprung from your scattered seed?
Yet you smile and say:
" Of course, it is not true. "
If this be not truth,
Then truth and I have never made a company.
You want no service, no compassion, no refreshment.
Tranquillity you think you have, or call it so,
I call it poison dripped from traitorous urns.
You pass me like a legend sprayed with flowers,
The legend of my youth, and now hence-forward
Of my age.
Pass, lady,
To whom I can give nothing, nothing.
Yet here again I say it,
With the doggedness of custom grown inveterate:
What you gave I give back again and shall,
Along the smooth years where you wander now,
Perfectly heedless of your heedlessness.
Truth is a brazen thing, and I,
Banging against the brass of utter fact,
Do make perhaps a horrid din
To your peace-longing ears.
So be it, I am silent,
But still here, believed or not,
A chance creation not at all desired,
Yet so existing while our double names
Shall carry any meaning to men's minds.
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