Let us assemble Fragments of a tradition,
Which is itself a Mosaic wrought from crushed Ruins.²
The wise as on they journey Treasure every Fragment clear—
Fit them as they may together, imaging the shattered Sphere.³
Masterpieces aren’t solitary births:
They are the outcome of many years
Thinking in Common, by the body of the people—
So the experience of the Mass is behind a single Voice.⁴
When any single thought emerges into consciousness we cannot rest
Until it is brought into Harmony with the remainder.
Every isolation is an abnormality, an untruth—
Truth is a whole Thought-World characterized
By Complete Inner Harmony.⁵
From behind our voice—listen, listen—other voices sing:
They come from buried mouths & Sing. They live now in our Gaze:
We sustain them with Our eyes, our words—that they’re not Lost!⁶
Their Antique pen would have express’d even such a
Beauty as we master now, so all their Praises are but
Prophesies of this our time, all us Prefiguring.⁷
We take Fire from another and Re-Endow
That which has enkindled it with a still Fiercer Flame!⁸
We reject none, accept all—then Reproduce all
In our own form: poems Distill’d from poems.⁹
For Occupation this: the spreading wide
Our narrow hands—to gather Paradise!¹⁰
¹ T.S. Eliot, Philip Massinger
² George Eliot, Middlemarch
³ Priscilla Leonard, Happiness
⁴ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
⁵ Rudolf Steiner, A Theory of Knowledge Based on Goethe’s World Conception
⁶ Circe Maia tr. original, From Behind My Voice
⁷ William Shakespeare, Sonnet CVI
⁸ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
⁹ Walt Whitman, By Blue Ontario’s Shore
¹⁰ Emily Dickinson, I Dwell in Possibility