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A Reasonable Protestation

by Sir John Collings Squire

[To F., who complained of his vagueness and lack of dogmatic statement]

Not, I suppose, since I deny

Appearance is reality,

And doubt the substance of the earth

Does your remonstrance come to birth;

Not that at once I both affirm

'Tis not the skin that makes the worm

And every tactile thing with mass

Must find its symbol in the grass

And with a cool conviction say

Even a critic's more than clay

And every dog outlives his day.

This kind of vagueness suits your view,

You would not carp at it; for you

Did never stand with those who take

Their pleasures in a world opaque.

For you a tree would never be

Lovely were it but a tree,

And earthly splendours never splendid

If by transience unattended.

Your eyes are on a farther shore

Than any of earth; nor do adore

As godhead God's dead hieroglyph.

Nor would you be perturbed if

Some prophet with a voice of thunder

And avalanche arm should blast and founder

The logical pillars that maintain

This visible world which loads the brain,

Loads the brain and withers the heart

And holds man from his God apart.

But still with you remains the craving

For some more solid substance, having

Surface to touch, colour to see,

And form compact in symmetry.

You are not satisfied with these

Vague throbbings, nameless ecstasies,

Nor can your spirit find delight

In an amorphic great white light.

Not with such sickles can you reap;

If a dense earth you cannot keep

You want a dense heaven as substitute

With trees of plump celestial fruit,

Red apples, golden pomegranates,

And a river flowing by tall gates

Of topaz and of chrysolite

And walls of twenty cubits height.

Frank, you cry out against the age!

Nor you nor I can disengage

Ourselves from that in which we live

Nor seize on things God does not give.

Thirsty as you, perhaps, I long

For courtyards of eternal song,

Even as yours my feet would stray

In a city where 'tis always day

And a green spontaneous leafy garden

With God in the middle for a warden;

But though I hope with strengthening faith

To taste when I have traversed death

The unimaginable sweetness

Of certitude of such concreteness,

How should I draw the hue and scope

Of substances I only hope

Or blaze upon a paper screen

The evidence of things not seen?

This art of ours but grows and stirs

Experience when it registers,

And you know well as I know well

This autumn of time in which we dwell

Is not an age of revelations

Solid as once, but intimations

That touch us with warm misty fingers

Leaving a nameless sense that lingers

That sight is blind and Time's a snare

And earth less solid than the air

And deep below all seeming things

There sits a steady king of kings

A radiant ageless permanence,

A quenchless fount of virtue whence

We draw our life; a sense that makes

A staunch conviction nothing shakes

Of our own immortality.

And though, being man, with certain glee

I eat and drink, though I suffer pain,

And love and hate and love again

Well or in mode contemptible,

Thus shackled by the body's spell

I see through pupils of the beast

Though it be faint and blurred with mist

A Star that travels in the East.

I see what I can, not what I will.

In things that move, things that are still;

Thin motion, even cloudier rest,

I see the symbols God hath drest.

The moveless trees, the trees that wave

The clouds that heavenly highways have,

Horses that run, rocks that are fixt,

Streams that have rest and motion mixt,

The main with its abiding flux,

The wind that up my chimney sucks

A mounting waterfall of flame,

Sticks, straws, dust, beetles and that same

Old blazing sun the Psalmist saw

A testifier to the law:

Divinely to the heart they speak

Saying how they are but weak,

Wan will-o'-the-wisps on the crystal sea;

But stays that sea still dark to me.

Did I now glibly insolent

Chart the ulterior firmament,

Would you not know my words were lies,

Where not my testimonial eyes

Mortal or spiritual lodge,

Mere uncorroborated fudge?

Praise me, though praise I do not want,

Rather, that I have cast much cant,

That what I see and feel I write,

Read what I can in this dim light

Granted to me in nether night.

And though I am vague and shrink to guess

God's everlasting purposes,

And never save in perplext dream

Have caught the least clear-shapen gleam

Of the great kingdom and the throne

In the world that lies behind our own,

I have not lacked my certainties,

I have not haggard moaned the skies,

Nor waged unnecessary strife

Nor scorned nor overvalued life.

And though you say my attitude

Is questioning, concede my mood

Does never bring to tongue or pen

Accents of gloomy modern men

Who wail or hail the death of God

And weigh and measure man the clod,

Or say they draw reluctant breath

And musically mourn that Death

Is a queen omnipotent of woe

And Life her lean cicisbeo,

Abject and pale, whom vampire-like

She playeth with ere she shall strike,

And pose sad riddles to the Sphinx

With raven quills in purple inks,

Then send the boy to fetch more drinks.