Poetry
Three Poems from The First Inheritance (1) The False Way HE who conceives himself to be Exempted from humility By a perception passing keen Of the rapt, intellectual scene—
The weight of sunsets, twine of cloud By which some men seem bound and bowed From the small freedoms of their kind To the great slavery of the Mind, The rich, abstract immensities And elemental densities, Piercing glow and dreamy glitter, Glad griefs, and joys with summits bitter, The answering harmonies and mocks Of male and female paradox, Earth's subtly linked and balanced range
Of modulated interchange—
Will come but to the cynic's brink Of loathed satiety, and find That he who sneers upon his kind Forfeits those passions of the mind Which, when a man's with them imbued, Protect his soul in solitude When fantasies would fain decay His first inheritance away.
(z) The Young Poet
Time was, I was content to be At one remove from poetry, Letting descend a veil of thought Between the eye and that it sought As its first heritage, singing blind Those barren words which, of the mind Born, to its slavery are sold, And from the deep blood voice withhold.
Until, with joy at full eclipse, And heart a metaphor of ice, Love laid an ember on my lips And burnt my song for sacrifice.
(3) As it was in the beginning
They who achieve the joyous cry " This is the quintessential ' " Have in them a voice that saith " Facts are the serving-maids of faith- " You are created by a tree, If you but watch it faithfully, A blade of grass gives you a soul If you've a mind to see it whole.
" There is no grain of earth so small But is, until the heavens fall, A standing place for him who to His first inheritance gives due."
JOHN MANN.
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