I never saw the world until that day,
The real fabulous world newly reborn,
And celebrated and crowned on every side
With sun and sky and lands of fruit and corn,
The dull ox and the high horse glorified,
Red images on the red clay,
And such a race of women and men,
I thought the famous ones had never died.
I speak in truth of what he showed me then.
But you whom he loved and yet could never dare
To win, how was it that you did not care
For such a man as he?
Oh he was dull,
Sick of the cheats of his phantasmal art
And that unending journey through no place,
He said, and asked to fly into the cool
And subterranean harbour of my heart,
Darker than his, more cool. He little thought
It was a riotous prison that he sought,
A place indeed, but such a place!
What could he give me, who was never his fool,
Nor Helen, nor Iseult, playing a harlot’s part?
I have wondered what he read into my face.
I knew a man, the most unlike that one,
I think the shrewdest, sweetest man
I ever saw, modest and yet a king
Among his harvests, with a harvester’s eye
That had forgotten to wonder why
At this or that, knowing his natural span,
And spoke of evil as “the other thing”,
Judging a virtue as he judged the weather,
Endured, accepted all, the equal brother
Of men and chance, the good and the bad day.
And whenI spoke of the high horse glorified,
He smiled and answered: Tell me, will it pull?
Or find its way in the dark? Is it on my side?
Then I’m its friend. But it must answer
To bit and rein. I do not want a dancer.
And yet he loved a good horse as a good
Workman or field or block of seasoned wood.
He was neither a plain nor a fanciful fool.
Yet that first world was beautiful
And true, stands still where first it stood.
I have known men and horses many a day.
Men come and go, the wise and the fanciful.
I ride my horse and make it go my way.