Mature Poets Steal¹

The Wise as on they journey Treasure
Every Fragment clear – Fit them as they
May together, imaging the Shattered Sphere²
Sorting Fragments of a Tradition – which is
Itself a Mosaic wrought from Crushed Ruins³
I Reject None, Accept All, then Reproduce all
In my own forms – Poems Distill’d from poems⁴
I’m Heir of all ages, in the Foremost files of time⁵
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 Prefiguring⁶
Masterpieces are not Single and Solitary births –
They’re the Outcome of many years Thinking in
Common, by the Body of the People, so that the
Experience of the Mass is behind a single Voice⁷
They Live now in your Gaze, Sustain them with
Your Eyes, your Words – that they’re not lost⁸
O blessed letters, that Combine in One All
Ages past – and make One Live with All⁹
For Occupation this: the Spreading wide
My narrow Hands – to gather Paradise¹⁰

¹ T.S. Eliot, Philip Massinge
² Priscilla Leonard, Happiness
³ George Eliot, Middlemarch
⁴ Walt Whitman, By Blue Ontario’s Shore
⁵ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall
⁶ William Shakespeare, Sonnet CVI
⁷ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
⁸ Circe Maia tr. original, From Behind My Voice
⁹ Samuel Daniel, Literature
¹⁰ Emily Dickinson, I Dwell in Possibility