Classic Poem

Not to ask, not to be answered,
Not to fall down from last of breath,
Not to be raised—the stricken mouth
Though fit uniquely to make shape
Of unique plaint for stricken mind:
Never to this final cave and mouth of mouths
Have you, are you come, contestant race
That boastfully flew birds of tiding here
So long—from extinct monster-wing,
That never flew, to the etherealest feather
That floated back from far, forgetting
What too-heavy auspices were hung
There on its thin prophetic claw.
Birds, birds, all bird-like were your reaches,
Minds quicker than your minds, vain flights
Of consolation. (‘It will be as time tells,
As we attempt, as thoughts anticipate
Against exhaustion and straggle of feet.’)

Your coming, asking, seeing, knowing,
Was a fleeing from and stumbling
Into only mirrors, and behind which,
Behind all mirrors, dazzling pretences,
The general light of fortune
Keeps wrapt in sleeping unsleep,
All-mute of time, self-muttering like mute:
Fatality like lone wise-woman
Her unbought secrets counting over
That stink of hell, from fuming in her lap.
Is this to be alone?
When, when the day when votary ghosts unpale
And shriek rebellion at themselves
So dumbly death-loyal serving her
In acquiescent guile—since never came
A word of angry flesh or impious meaning
Through that hushed screen of priding world?
When, when the day? Is this to be alone?

Newspapers, mirrors, birds and births and clocks
Divide you from her by a trembling film
That never may dissolve between.
Perhaps even as you were will you remain
Such other manufactures of yourselves—
While round her storm unwillingly
Your empty spirits like better selves
You dared not be or gainsay—arguing,
‘That ancient mystery-monger grows
By times of ours more and more ancient,
More deaf and slow in deeper company
Of omens private to her distance,
And love of talking lone in unheard bodement.’

But when, when the day? Is this to be alone?