Mature Poets Steal[1]
Sorting Fragments of a Tradition – which is
Itself a Mosaic wrought from Crushed Ruins[2]
I Reject None, Accept All, then Reproduce all
In my own forms – poems Distill’d from poems[3]
Their Antique Pen would have Express’d even such
A Beauty as you Master now, so all their Praises are
But Prophesies of this our Time – All you Prefiguring[4]
When any Single Thought emerges into consciousness, I
Cannot rest ‘til it’s 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]
The Wise as on they journey Treasure every Fragment clear,
Fit them as they may together, imaging the Shattered Sphere[6]
I the Heir of all the Ages – in the Foremost Files of time[7]
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 Voice[8]
They Live now in your Gaze, Sustain them with
Your Eyes, your Words – that they’re not Lost[9]
For Occupation – this: the Spreading wide
My narrow Hands to gather Paradise[10]
[1] T.S. Eliot, Philip Massinger
[2] George Eliot, Middlemarch
[3] Walt Whitman, By Blue Ontario’s Shore
[4] William Shakespeare, Sonnet CVI
[5] Rudolf Steiner, A Theory of Knowledge Based on Goethe’s World Conception
[6] Priscilla Leonard, Happiness
[7] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall
[8] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
[9] Circe Maia tr. original, From Behind My Voice
[10] Emily Dickinson, I Dwell in Possibility