"The Will of God": a cento.

[ladyvoldything]

The Will of God

It is time that I wrote my will;
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
Lower than death and the dark?

O sages standing in God's holy fire
To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs,
Old lecher with a love on every wind,
God, three-numberèd form;
I must recall a man that neither love—
And I will show you something different from either.

         To lords and ladies of Byzantium—
         They shall inherit my pride.

An aged man is but a paltry thing:
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Character isolated by a deed
(As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse)
Trenched with tears, carved with cares;
Since country is so tender
He who was living is now dead.

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Lord of living and dead;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker;
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

         You who were with me in the ships at Mylae—
         The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas.

Before that ruin came, for centuries
The land's sharp features seemed to be
Excited, passionate, fantastical—
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain
(And there’s a story in a book about it)
And after it almost unmade, what with dread—
But I have found an answer in those eyes:
I would meet you upon this honestly.

A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
Of the backward devils
That climb the streams until
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge.
I have spread my dreams out under your feet. 

         I leave both faith and pride
         In the mountains, there you feel free.

As I would question all, come all who can.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
With witness I speak this. But where I say
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
As I do now against old age?
We lash with the best or worst
Whether in public or in secret rage;

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
One is alone, and he dies more alone.
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Rose from the table and declared it right
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

         For the prosaic light of day—
         A heap of broken images, where the sun beats.

I am gall, I am heartburn: God’s most deep decree
After the frosty silence in the Gardens. 
Some few remembered still when I was young-
The dense and driven Passion, and frightful sweat.
What stir ran through the countryside
In a flash of lightning! Then a damp gust-
The shouting and the crying-
Those amorous cries that out of quiet come
Since seems I kissed the rod. 

The workman, noble and saint, and as all things run
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago,
Drinking joy as it were milk upon his breast:
So great a glory did the song confer.
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it
Out of this stony rubbish? 
Son of man, 
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

         Gentile or Jew—
         The awful daring of a moment’s surrender.

O towards I have forgotten what - enough!
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now—
What is that sound high in the air?
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Thy terror, O Christ, O God,
Like a patient etherized upon a table
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Without human feeling, a foreign song-
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.)

         To hero of Calvary, Christ, ’s feet—
         A broken drinking goblet like the Grail.

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
You know then that it is not the reason
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Once out of nature I shall never take
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
For if I triumph I must make men mad.

         Jesu, heart’s light—
         Jesu, maid’s son—
         The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring.

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
To have squeezed the universe into a ball-
-And would it have been worth it, after all?
The heart’s gone out of it: why keep it up.

This was my poetry final exam assignment, writing a cento using poems we've read for class. I hope you liked it! It's 103 lines long, which is a smidge over the 20-40 line limit, but fuck it. I needed this to be big.
I stitched it together from the works of Yeats, Eliot, Frost, Wallace Stevens, Hopkins, and a lone line from Thomas Hardy.

Comments

[komikbookgeek]

This is lovely.

[ladyvoldything]

Thanks. :D

[lavanille]

This is beautiful. I love it.