J. V. Cunningham

There is no stillness in this wood. The quiet of this clearing Is the denial of my hearing The sounds I should. There is no vision in this glade. This tower of sun revealing The timbered scaffoldage is stealing Essence from shade. Only my love is love’s ideal. The love I could discover In these recesses knows no lover, Is the unreal, The undefined, unanalysed, Unabsolute many; It is antithesis of any, In none comprised.

And does the heart grow old? You know In the indiscriminate green Of summer or in earliest snow A landscape is another scene, Inchoate and anonymous, And every rock and bush and drift As our affections alter us Will alter with the season’s shift. So love by love we come at last, As through the exclusions of a rhyme, Or the exactions of a past, To the simplicity of time, The antiquity of grace, where yet We live in terror and delight With love as quiet as regret And love like anger in the night.

I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises. I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises, Thirst where the grasses burn in early May And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay. There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat. So to this hour. Through the warm dusk I drove To blizzards sifting on the hissing stove, And found no images of pastoral will, But fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.

You are the problem I propose, My dear, the text my musings glose: I call you for convenience love. By definition you’re a cause Inferred by necessary laws— You are so to the saints above. But in this shadowy lower life I sleep with a terrestrial wife And earthy children I beget. Love is a fiction I must use, A privilege I can abuse, And sometimes something I forget. Now, in the heavenly other place Love is in the eternal mind The luminous form whose shade she is, A ghost discarnate, thought defined. She was so to my early bliss, She is so while I comprehend The forms my senses apprehend, And in the end she will be so. Her whom my hands embrace I kiss, Her whom my mind infers I know. The one exists in time and space And as she was she will not be; The other is in her own grace And is She is eternally. Plato! you shall not plague my life. I married a terrestrial wife. And Hume! she is not mere sensation In sequence of observed relation. She has two forms—ah, thank you, Duns!—, I know her in both ways at once. I knew her, yes, before I knew her, And by both means I must construe her, And none among you shall undo her.

Plato, despair! We prove by norms How numbers bear Empiric forms, How random wrong Will average right If time be long And error slight, But in our hearts Hyperbole Curves and departs To infinity. Error is boundless. Nor hope nor doubt, Though both be groundless, Will average out.

How time reverses The proud in heart! I now make verses Who aimed at art. But I sleep well. Ambitious boys Whose big lines swell With spiritual noise, Despise me not! And be not queasy To praise somewhat: Verse is not easy. But rage who will. Time that procured me Good sense and skill Of madness cured me.

If wisdom, as it seems it is, Be the recovery of some bliss From the conditions of disaster— Terror the servant, man the master— It does not follow we should seek Crises to prove ourselves unweak. Much of our lives, God knows, is error, But who will trifle with unrest? These fools who would solicit terror, Obsessed with being unobsessed; Professionals of experience Who have disasters to withstand them As if fear never had unmanned them, Flaunt a presumptuous innocence. I have preferred indifference.

This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

After some years Bohemian came to this— This Maenad with hair down and gaping kiss Wild on the barren edge of under fifty. She would finance his art if he were thrifty.

In the thirtieth year of life I took my heart to be my wife, And as I turn in bed by night I have my heart for my delight. No other heart may mine estrange For my heart changes as I change, And it is bound, and I am free, And with my death it dies with me.