THE STATUES
 
 PYTHAGORAS planned it.  Why did the people stare?
 His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
 In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
 But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
 Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
 That passion could bring character enough,
 And pressed at midnight in some public place
 Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
 No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men
 That with a mallet or a chisel" modelled these
 Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down
 All Asiatic vague immensities,
 And not the banks of oars that swam upon
 The many-headed foam at Salamis.
 Europe put off that foam when Phidias
 Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass.
 One image crossed the many-headed, sat
 Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow,
 No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat
 Dreamer of the Middle Ages.  Empty eyeballs knew
 That knowledge increases unreality, that
 Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
 When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
 Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness.
 When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side.
 What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,
 What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
 We Irish, born into that ancient sect
 But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
 And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
 Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
 The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.
 April 9,