ROBARTES

Have you not always known it?

AHERNE

The song will have it That those that we have loved got their long fingers From death, and wounds, or on Sinai's top, Or from some b.l.o.o.d.y whip in their own hands.

They ran from cradle to cradle till at last Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness Of body and soul.

ROBARTES

The lovers' heart knows that.

AHERNE

It must be that the terror in their eyes Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.

ROBARTES

When the moon's full those creatures of the full Are met on the waste hills by country men Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves, Caught up in contemplation, the mind's eye Fixed upon images that once were thought, For separate, perfect, and immovable Images can break the solitude Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.

_And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice Aherne laughed, thinking of the man within, His sleepless candle and laborious pen._

ROBARTES

And after that the crumbling of the moon.

The soul remembering its loneliness Shudders in many cradles; all is changed, It would be the World's servant, and as it serves, Choosing whatever task's most difficult Among tasks not impossible, it takes Upon the body and upon the soul The coa.r.s.eness of the drudge.

AHERNE

Before the full It sought itself and afterwards the world.

ROBARTES

Because you are forgotten, half out of life, And never wrote a book your thought is clear.

Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man, Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn, Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all Deformed because there is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

AHERNE

And what of those That the last servile crescent has set free?

ROBARTES

Because all dark, like those that are all light, They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud, Crying to one another like the bats; And having no desire they cannot tell What's good or bad, or what it is to triumph At the perfection of one's own obedience; And yet they speak what's blown into the mind; Deformed beyond deformity, unformed, Insipid as the dough before it is baked, They change their bodies at a word.

AHERNE

And then?

ROBARTES

When all the dough has been so kneaded up That it can take what form cook Nature fancy The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more.

AHERNE

But the escape; the song's not finished yet.

ROBARTES

Hunchback and saint and fool are the last crescents.

The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow Out of the up and down, the wagon wheel Of beauty's cruelty and wisdom's chatter, Out of that raving tide is drawn betwixt Deformity of body and of mind.

AHERNE

Were not our beds far off I'd ring the bell, Stand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall Beside the castle door, where all is stark Austerity, a place set out for wisdom That he will never find; I'd play a part; He would never know me after all these years But take me for some drunken country man; I'd stand and mutter there until he caught 'Hunchback and saint and fool,' and that they came Under the three last crescents of the moon, And then I'd stagger out. He'd crack his wits Day after day, yet never find the meaning.

_And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard Should be so simple--a bat rose from the hazels And circled round him with its squeaky cry, The light in the tower window was put out._

THE CAT AND THE MOON

The cat went here and there And the moon spun round like a top, And the nearest kin of the moon The creeping cat looked up.

Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon, For wander and wail as he would The pure cold light in the sky Troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the gra.s.s, Lifting his delicate feet.

Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?

When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance, Maybe the moon may learn, Tired of that courtly fashion, A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the gra.s.s From moonlit place to place, The sacred moon overhead Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils Will pa.s.s from change to change, And that from round to crescent, From crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the gra.s.s Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing moon His changing eyes.

THE SAINT AND THE HUNCHBACK

HUNCHBACK

Stand up and lift your hand and bless A man that finds great bitterness In thinking of his lost renown.

A Roman Caesar is held down Under this hump.

SAINT

G.o.d tries each man According to a different plan.

I shall not cease to bless because I lay about me with the taws That night and morning I may thrash Greek Alexander from my flesh, Augustus Caesar, and after these That great rogue Alcibiades.

HUNCHBACK