The Double Vision of Michael Robartes
On the grey rock of Cashel the mind's eyeHas called up the cold spirits that are bornWhen the old moon is vanished from the skyAnd the new still hides her horn.
Under blank eyes and fingers never stillThe particular is pounded till it is man,When had I my own will?Oh, not since life began.
Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbentBy these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood,Themselves obedient,Knowing not evil and good;
Obedient to some hidden magical breath.They do not even feel, so abstract are they,So dead beyond our death,Triumph that we obey.
On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly sawA Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,A Buddha, hand at rest,Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at playThat it may be had danced her life away,For now being dead it seemedThat she of dancing dreamed.
Although I saw it all in the mind's eyeThere can be nothing solider till I die;I saw by the moon's lightNow at its fifteenth night.
One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moonGazed upon all things known, all things unknown,In triumph of intellectWith motionless head erect.
That other's moonlit eyeballs never moved,Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,Yet little peace he hadFor those that love are sad.
Oh, little did they care who danced between,And little she by whom her dance was seenSo that she danced. No thought,Body perfection brought,
For what but eye and ear silence the mindWith the minute particulars of mankind?Mind moved yet seemed to stopAs 'twere a spinning-top.
In contemplation had those three so wroughtUpon a moment, and so stretched it outThat they, time overthrown,Were dead yet flesh and bone.
I knew that I had seen, had seen at lastThat girl my unremembering nights hold fastOr else my dreams that fly,If I should rub an eye,
And yet in flying fling into my meatA crazy juice that makes the pulses beatAs though I had been undoneBy Homer's Paragon
Who never gave the burning town a thought;To such a pitch of folly I am brought,Being caught between the pullOf the dark moon and the full,
The commonness of thought and imagesThat have the frenzy of our Western seas.Thereon I made my moan,And after kissed a stone,
And after that arranged it in a songSeeing that I, ignorant for so long,Had been rewarded thusIn Cormac's ruined house.
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