THE DOUBLE VISION OF MICHAEL ROBARTES
  I
 ON the grey rock of Cashel the mind's eye
 Has called up the cold spirits that are born
 When the old moon is vanished from the sky
 And the new still hides her horn.
 Under blank eyes and fingers never still
 The particular is pounded till it is man.
 When had I my own will?
 O not since life began.
 Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
 By 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 saw
 A 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 play
 That, it may be, had danced her life away,
 For now being dead it seemed
 That she of dancing dreamed.
 Although I saw it all in the mind's eye
 There can be nothing solider till I die;
 I saw by the moon's light
 Now at its fifteenth night.
 One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon
 Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
 In triumph of intellect
 With motionless head erect.
 That other's moonlit eyeballs never moved,
 Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved.
 Yet little peace he had,
 For those that love are sad.  
 Little did they care who danced between,
 And little she by whom her dance was seen
 So she had outdanced thought.
 Body perfection brought,
 For what but eye and ear silence the mind
 With the minute particulars of mankind?
 Mind moved yet seemed to stop
 As 'twere a spinning-top.
 In contemplation had those three so wrought
 Upon a moment, and so stretched it out
 That they, time overthrown,
 Were dead yet flesh and bone.
 I knew that I had seen, had seen at last
 That girl my unremembering nights hold fast
 Or else my dreams that fly
 If I should rub an eye,
 And yet in flying fling into my meat
 A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat
 As though I had been undone
 By Homer's Paragon
 Who never gave the burning town a thought;
 To such a pitch of folly I am brought,
 Being caught between the pull
 Of the dark moon and the full,
 The commonness of thought and images
 That have the frenzy of our western seas.
 Thereon I made my moan,
 And after kissed a stone,
 And after that arranged it in a song
 Seeing that I, ignorant for So long,
 Had been rewarded thus
 In Cormac's ruined house.
 
 MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER
 
 He. Opinion is not worth a rush;
 In this altar-piece the knight,
 Who grips his long spear so to push
 That dragon through the fading light,
 Loved the lady; and it's plain
 The half-dead dragon was her thought,
 That every morning rose again
 And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.
 Could the impossible come to pass
 She would have time to turn her eyes,
 Her lover thought, upon the glass
 And on the instant would grow wise.
 She. You mean they argued.
 He. Put it so;
 But bear in mind your lover's wage
 Is what your looking-glass can show,
 And that he will turn green with rage
 At all that is not pictured there.
 She. May I not put myself to college?
 He. Go pluck Athene by the hair;
 For what mere book can grant a knowledge
 With an impassioned gravity
 Appropriate to that beating breast,
 That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye?
 And may the Devil take the rest.
 She. And must no beautiful woman be
 Learned like a man?
 He. Paul Veronese
 And all his sacred company
 Imagined bodies all their days
 By the lagoon you love so much,
 For proud, soft, ceremonious proof
 That all must come to sight and touch;
 While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof,
 His "Morning' and his "Night' disclose
 How sinew that has been pulled tight,
 Or it may be loosened in repose,
 Can rule by supernatural right
 Yet be but sinew.
 She. I have heard said
 There is great danger in the body.
 He. Did God in portioning wine and bread
 Give man His thought or His mere body?
 She. My wretched dragon is perplexed.
 Hec. I have principles to prove me right.
 It follows from this Latin text
 That blest souls are not composite,
 And that all beautiful women may
 Live in uncomposite blessedness,
 And lead us to the like – if they
 Will banish every thought, unless
 The lineaments that please their view
 When the long looking-glass is full,
 Even from the foot-sole think it too.
 She. They say such different things at school.