Prelude
Tun dead man spoke to me and begged a penny,
For God's sake, and for yotirs and mine, he, said,
Slowly under the streetlamp turned his head, I saw his eyes wide open and he stared Through me as if my bones and flesh were nothing, Through me and through the earth and through the void, His eyes were dark and wide and cold and empty As if his vision had become a grave Larger than bones of any world could fill, But crystal clear and deep and deeply still.'
Poor devil—why, he wants to close his eyes, He wants a charity to close his eyes, And follows me with outstretched palm, from world to world And house to house and street to street, Under the streetlamps and along dark alleys, And sits beside me in my room, and sleeps Upright with eyes wide open by my bed, Circles the Pleiades with a glance, returns From cold Orion with a slow turn of the head, Looks north and south at once, and all the while Holds, in that void of an unfocussed stare, My own poor footsteps, saying I have read Time in the rock and in the human heart, Space in the bloodstream, and those lesser works Written by rose and wind flower on the summer, sung By water and snow, deciphered by the eye, Translated by the slaves of memory, And all that you be you, and I be I, Or all that by imagination, aping God, the supreme poet of despair, I may be you, you me, before our time Knowing the rank intolerable taste of death, And walking dead on the still living earth.
. . . I rose and dressed and descended the stair Into the sunlight, and he came with me, Staring the skeleton from the daffodil, Freezing the snowflake in the blackbird's whistle, And with that cold profound unhating eye He moved the universe from east to west, Slowly, disastrously,—but with such splendour
As God, the supreme poet of delight, might envy,—
To the magnificent sepulchre of sleep. CONRAD AMEN.'
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