To E. Fitzgerald: Tiresias

OLD FITZ, who from your suburb grange,
     Where once I tarried for a while,
     Glance at the wheeling orb of change,
     And greet it with a kindly smile;
     Whom yet I see as there you sit
     Beneath your sheltering garden-tree,
     And watch your doves about you flit,
     And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee,
     Or on your head their rosy feet,
     As if they knew your diet spares
     Whatever moved in that full sheet
     Let down to Peter at his prayers;
     Who live on milk and meal and grass;
     And once for ten long weeks I tried
     Your table of Pythagoras,
     - And seem'd at first "a thing enskied,"
     As Shakespeare has it, airy-light
     To float above the ways of men,
     Then fell from that half-spiritual height
     Chill'd, till I tasted flesh again
     One night when earth was winter-b]ack,
     And all the heavens flash'd in frost;
     And on me, half-asleep, came back
     That wholesome heat the blood had lost,
     And set me climbing icy capes
     And glaciers, over which there roll'd
     To meet me long-arm'd vines with grapes
     Of Eshcol hugeness- for the cold
     Without, and warmth within me, wrought
     To mould the dream; but none can say
     That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought
     Who reads your golden Eastern lay,
     Than which I know no version done
     In English more divinely well;
     A planet equal to the sun
     Which cast it, that large infidel
     Your Omar, and your Omar drew
     Full-handed plaudits from our best
     In modern letters, and from two,
     Old friends outvaluing all the rest,
     Two voices heard on earth no more;
     But we old friends are still alive,
     And I am nearing seventy-four,
     While you have touch'd at seventy-five,
     And so I send a birthday line
     Of greeting; and my son, who dipt
     In some forgotten book of mine
     With sallow scraps of manuscript,
     And dating many a year ago,
     Has hit on this, which you will take,
     My Fitz, and welcome, as I know,
     Less for its own than for the sake
     Of one recalling gracious times,
     When, in our younger London days,
     You found some merit in my rhymes,
     And I more pleasure in your praise.

                      TIRESIAS

          I WISH I were as in the years of old
          While yet the blessed daylight made itself
          Ruddy thro' both the roofs of sight, and woke
          These eyes, now dull, but then so keen to seek
          The meanings ambush'd under all they saw,
          The flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice,
          What omens may foreshadow fate to man
          And woman, and the secret of the Gods.
          My son, the Gods, despite of human prayer,
          Are slower to forgive than human kings.
          The great God Ares burns in anger still

          Against the guiltless heirs of him from Tyre
          Our Cadmus, out of whom thou art, who found
          Beside the springs of Dirce, smote, and still'd
          Thro' all its folds the multitudinous beast
          The dragon, which our trembling fathers call'd
          The God's own son.
               A tale, that told to me,
          When but thine age, by age as winter-white
          As mine is now, amazed, but made me yearn
          For larger glimpses of that more than man
          Which rolls the heavens, and lifts and lays the deep,
          Yet loves and hates with mortal hates and loves,
          And moves unseen among the ways of men.
          Then, in my wanderings all the lands that lie
          Subjected to the Heliconian ridge
          Have heard this footstep fall, altho' my wont
          Was more to scale the highest of the heights
          With some strange hope to see the nearer God.
          One naked peak‹the sister of the Sun
          Would climb from out the dark, and linger there

          To silver all the valleys with her shafts‹
          There once, but long ago, five-fold thy term
          Of years, I lay; the winds were dead for heat-
          The noonday crag made the hand burn; and sick
          For shadow‹not one bush was near‹I rose
          Following a torrent till its myriad falls
          Found silence in the hollows underneath.
          There in a secret olive-glade I saw
          Pallas Athene climbing from the bath
          In anger; yet one glittering foot disturb'd
          The lucid well; one snowy knee was prest