Persuasion

Then I asked: 'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?'     He replied: 'All Poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.'     Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.     I     At any moment love unheralded     Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall     Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread     Are withered in untimely burial,     So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by,     And as a beggar walks unfriended ways,     With but remembered beauty to defy     The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days.     Or in that later travelling he comes     Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells     Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs     Are all now that love was, and blindly spells     His royal state of old a glory cursed,     Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst.     II.     If we should part upon that one embrace,     And set our courses ever, each from each,     With all our treasure but a fading face     And little ghostly syllables of speech;     Should beauty's moment never be renewed,     And moons on moons look out for us in vain,     And each but whisper from a solitude     To hear but echoes of a lonely pain,,     Still in a world that fortune cannot change     Should walk those two that once were you and I,     Those two that once when moon and stars were strange     Poets above us in an April sky,     Heard a voice falling on the midnight sea,     Mute, and for ever, but for you and me.     III.     This nature, this great flood of life, this cheat     That uses us as baubles for her coat,     Takes love, that should be nothing but the beat     Of blood for its own beauty, by the throat,     Saying, you are my servant and shall do     My purposes, or utter bitterness     Shall be your wage, and nothing come to you     But stammering tongues that never can confess.     Undaunted then in answer here I cry,     'You wanton, that control the hand of him     Who masquerades as wisdom in a sky     Where holy, holy, sing the cherubim,     I will not pay one penny to your name     Though all my body crumble into shame.'     IV.     Woman, I once had whimpered at your hand,     Saying that all the wisdom that I sought     Lay in your brain, that you were as the sand     Should cleanse the muddy mirrors of my thought;     I should have read in you the character     Of oracles that quick a thousand lays,     Looked in your eyes, and seen accounted there     Solomons legioned for bewildered praise.     Now have I learnt love as love is. I take     Your hand, and with no inquisition learn     All that your eyes can tell, and that's to make     A little reckoning and brief, then turn     Away, and in my heart I hear a call,     'I love, I love, I love'; and that is all.     V.     When all the hungry pain of love I bear,     And in poor lightless thought but burn and burn,     And wit goes hunting wisdom everywhere,     Yet can no word of revelation learn;     When endlessly the scales of yea and nay     In dreadful motion fall and rise and fall,     When all my heart in sorrow I could pay     Until at last were left no tear at all;     Then if with tame or subtle argument     Companions come and draw me to a place     Where words are but the tappings of content,     And life spreads all her garments with a grace,     I curse that ease, and hunger in my heart     Back to my pain and lonely to depart.     VI.     Not anything you do can make you mine,     For enterprise with equal charity     In duty as in love elect will shine,     The constant slave of mutability.     Nor can your words for all their honey breath     Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme,     And though my ear deliver them from death     One day or two, it is so little time.     Nor does your beauty in its excellence     Excel a thousand in the daily sun,     Yet must I put a period to pretence,     And with my logic's catalogue have done,     For act and word and beauty are but keys     To unlock the heart, and you, dear love, are these.     VII.     Never the heart of spring had trembled so     As on that day when first in Paradise     We went afoot as novices to know     For the first time what blue was in the skies,     What fresher green than any in the grass,     And how the sap goes beating to the sun,     And tell how on the clocks of beauty pass     Minute by minute till the last is done.     But not the new birds singing in the brake,     And not the buds of our discovery,     The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache     For beauty that we shadow as we see,     Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings,     Took these, and made them Paradisal things.     VIII.     The lilacs offer beauty to the sun,     Throbbing with wonder as eternally     For sad and happy lovers they have done     With the first bloom of summer in the sky;     Yet they are newly spread in honour now,     Because, for every beam of beauty given     Out of that clustering heart, back to the bough     My love goes beating, from a greater heaven.     So be my love for good or sorry luck     Bound, it has virtue on this April eve     That shall be there for ever when they pluck     Lilacs for love. And though I come to grieve     Long at a frosty tomb, there still shall be     My happy lyric in the lilac tree.     IX.     When they make silly question of my love,     And speak to me of danger and disdain,     And look by fond old argument to move     My wisdom to docility again;     When to my prouder heart they set the pride     Of custom and the gossip of the street,     And show me figures of myself beside     A self diminished at their judgment seat;     Then do I sit as in a drowsy pew     To hear a priest expounding th' heavenly will,     Defiling wonder that he never knew     With stolen words of measured good and ill;     For to the love that knows their counselling,     Out of my love contempt alone I bring.     X.     Not love of you is most that I can bring,     Since what I am to love you is the test,     And should I love you more than any thing     You would but be of idle love possessed,     A mere love wandering in appetite,     Counting your glories and yet bringing none,     Finding in you occasions of delight,     A thief of payment for no service done.     But when of labouring life I make a song     And bring it you, as that were my reward,     To let what most is me to you belong,     Then do I come of high possessions lord,     And loving life more than my love of you     I give you love more excellently true.     XI.     What better tale could any lover tell     When age or death his reckoning shall write     Than thus, 'Love taught me only to rebel     Against these things, the thieving of delight     Without return; the gospellers of fear     Who, loving, yet deny the truth they bear,     Sad-suited lusts with lecherous hands to smear     The cloth of gold they would but dare not wear.     And love gave me great knowledge of the trees,     And singing birds, and earth with all her flowers;     Wisdom I knew and righteousness in these,     I lived in their atonement all my hours;     Love taught me how to beauty's eye alone     The secret of the lying heart is known.'     XII.     This then at last; we may be wiser far     Than love, and put his folly to our measure,     Yet shall we learn, poor wizards that we are,     That love chimes not nor motions at our pleasure.     We bid him come, and light an eager fire,     And he goes down the road without debating;     We cast him from the house of our desire,     And when at last we leave he will be waiting.     And in the end there is no folly but this,     To counsel love out of our little learning.     For still he knows where rotten timber is,     And where the boughs for the long winter burning;     And when life needs no more of us at all,     Love's word will be the last that we recall.