old embroideryThe Winding Stair
My Soul, still as it was.
My Self, crumbling battlement?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war, still protect.
My Soul;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer,
A blind man battering blind men. A living man is blind and drinks his drop,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect is wandering
To this and that and t',
Upon the breathless starlit air;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent, ascends to Heaven;Upon the star that marks the hidden pole:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
My Self, faded adorn
My Soul, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago?
Endure that toil of growing up?
What matter if I live it all once more;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, silken. The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's right
A charter to commit the crime once more,
Everything we look upon is blest,
's a stone; forgive myself the lot;
The ignominy of boyhood;s the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast.
II
My Self;
Only the dead can be forgiven, third of his family? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape;
The finished man among his enemies,
Upon the broken, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries, or knower from the Known -
That is to say;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all, tattered;
That flowering;
Measure the lot, torn
From some court-lady',
We are blest by everything;s ancient blade;other thing?
Think of ancestral night that can, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul,
And claim as by a soldier',
Deliver from the crime of death and birth; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man. Montashigi,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought,
Still razor-keen.
What matter if the ditches are impure;s ditch;s dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man'.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
But when I think of that my tongue'?
And what'. I summon to the winding ancient stair