Persuasion

Then I asked: 'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?'

He replied: 'All Poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.'

Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.

I

At any moment love unheralded

Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall

Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread

Are withered in untimely burial,

So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by,

And as a beggar walks unfriended ways,

With but remembered beauty to defy

The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days.

Or in that later travelling he comes

Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells

Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs

Are all now that love was, and blindly spells

His royal state of old a glory cursed,

Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst.

II.

If we should part upon that one embrace,

And set our courses ever, each from each,

With all our treasure but a fading face

And little ghostly syllables of speech;

Should beauty's moment never be renewed,

And moons on moons look out for us in vain,

And each but whisper from a solitude

To hear but echoes of a lonely pain,,

Still in a world that fortune cannot change

Should walk those two that once were you and I,

Those two that once when moon and stars were strange

Poets above us in an April sky,

Heard a voice falling on the midnight sea,

Mute, and for ever, but for you and me.

III.

This nature, this great flood of life, this cheat

That uses us as baubles for her coat,

Takes love, that should be nothing but the beat

Of blood for its own beauty, by the throat,

Saying, you are my servant and shall do

My purposes, or utter bitterness

Shall be your wage, and nothing come to you

But stammering tongues that never can confess.

Undaunted then in answer here I cry,

'You wanton, that control the hand of him

Who masquerades as wisdom in a sky

Where holy, holy, sing the cherubim,

I will not pay one penny to your name

Though all my body crumble into shame.'

IV.

Woman, I once had whimpered at your hand,

Saying that all the wisdom that I sought

Lay in your brain, that you were as the sand

Should cleanse the muddy mirrors of my thought;

I should have read in you the character

Of oracles that quick a thousand lays,

Looked in your eyes, and seen accounted there

Solomons legioned for bewildered praise.

Now have I learnt love as love is. I take

Your hand, and with no inquisition learn

All that your eyes can tell, and that's to make

A little reckoning and brief, then turn

Away, and in my heart I hear a call,

'I love, I love, I love'; and that is all.

V.

When all the hungry pain of love I bear,

And in poor lightless thought but burn and burn,

And wit goes hunting wisdom everywhere,

Yet can no word of revelation learn;

When endlessly the scales of yea and nay

In dreadful motion fall and rise and fall,

When all my heart in sorrow I could pay

Until at last were left no tear at all;

Then if with tame or subtle argument

Companions come and draw me to a place

Where words are but the tappings of content,

And life spreads all her garments with a grace,

I curse that ease, and hunger in my heart

Back to my pain and lonely to depart.

VI.

Not anything you do can make you mine,

For enterprise with equal charity

In duty as in love elect will shine,

The constant slave of mutability.

Nor can your words for all their honey breath

Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme,

And though my ear deliver them from death

One day or two, it is so little time.

Nor does your beauty in its excellence

Excel a thousand in the daily sun,

Yet must I put a period to pretence,

And with my logic's catalogue have done,

For act and word and beauty are but keys

To unlock the heart, and you, dear love, are these.

VII.

Never the heart of spring had trembled so

As on that day when first in Paradise

We went afoot as novices to know

For the first time what blue was in the skies,

What fresher green than any in the grass,

And how the sap goes beating to the sun,

And tell how on the clocks of beauty pass

Minute by minute till the last is done.

But not the new birds singing in the brake,

And not the buds of our discovery,

The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache

For beauty that we shadow as we see,

Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings,

Took these, and made them Paradisal things.

VIII.

The lilacs offer beauty to the sun,

Throbbing with wonder as eternally

For sad and happy lovers they have done

With the first bloom of summer in the sky;

Yet they are newly spread in honour now,

Because, for every beam of beauty given

Out of that clustering heart, back to the bough

My love goes beating, from a greater heaven.

So be my love for good or sorry luck

Bound, it has virtue on this April eve

That shall be there for ever when they pluck

Lilacs for love. And though I come to grieve

Long at a frosty tomb, there still shall be

My happy lyric in the lilac tree.

IX.

When they make silly question of my love,

And speak to me of danger and disdain,

And look by fond old argument to move

My wisdom to docility again;

When to my prouder heart they set the pride

Of custom and the gossip of the street,

And show me figures of myself beside

A self diminished at their judgment seat;

Then do I sit as in a drowsy pew

To hear a priest expounding th' heavenly will,

Defiling wonder that he never knew

With stolen words of measured good and ill;

For to the love that knows their counselling,

Out of my love contempt alone I bring.

X.

Not love of you is most that I can bring,

Since what I am to love you is the test,

And should I love you more than any thing

You would but be of idle love possessed,

A mere love wandering in appetite,

Counting your glories and yet bringing none,

Finding in you occasions of delight,

A thief of payment for no service done.

But when of labouring life I make a song

And bring it you, as that were my reward,

To let what most is me to you belong,

Then do I come of high possessions lord,

And loving life more than my love of you

I give you love more excellently true.

XI.

What better tale could any lover tell

When age or death his reckoning shall write

Than thus, 'Love taught me only to rebel

Against these things, the thieving of delight

Without return; the gospellers of fear

Who, loving, yet deny the truth they bear,

Sad-suited lusts with lecherous hands to smear

The cloth of gold they would but dare not wear.

And love gave me great knowledge of the trees,

And singing birds, and earth with all her flowers;

Wisdom I knew and righteousness in these,

I lived in their atonement all my hours;

Love taught me how to beauty's eye alone

The secret of the lying heart is known.'

XII.

This then at last; we may be wiser far

Than love, and put his folly to our measure,

Yet shall we learn, poor wizards that we are,

That love chimes not nor motions at our pleasure.

We bid him come, and light an eager fire,

And he goes down the road without debating;

We cast him from the house of our desire,

And when at last we leave he will be waiting.

And in the end there is no folly but this,

To counsel love out of our little learning.

For still he knows where rotten timber is,

And where the boughs for the long winter burning;

And when life needs no more of us at all,

Love's word will be the last that we recall.