"Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?"Says he; and there shines out of him again An aged light that has no age or station --The mystery that's his -- a mischievous Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame For being won so easy, and at friends Who laugh at him for what he wants the most, And for his dukedom down in Warwickshire; --By which you see we're all a little jealous....
Poor Greene! I fear the color of his name Was even as that of his ascending soul;And he was one where there are many others, --Some scrivening to the end against their fate, Their puppets all in ink and all to die there;And some with hands that once would shade an eye That scanned Euripides and Aeschylus Will reach by this time for a pot-house mop To slush their first and last of royalties.
Poor devils! and they all play to his hand;For so it was in Athens and old Rome.
But that's not here or there; I've wandered off.
Greene does it, or I'm careful.Where's that boy?
Yes, he'll go back to Stratford.And we'll miss him?
Dear sir, there'll be no London here without him.
We'll all be riding, one of these fine days, Down there to see him -- and his wife won't like us;And then we'll think of what he never said Of women -- which, if taken all in all With what he did say, would buy many horses.
Though nowadays he's not so much for women:
"So few of them," he says, "are worth the guessing."But there's a work at work when he says that, And while he says it one feels in the air A deal of circumambient hocus-pocus.
They've had him dancing till his toes were tender, And he can feel 'em now, come chilly rains.
There's no long cry for going into it, However, and we don't know much about it.
The Fitton thing was worst of all, I fancy;And you in Stratford, like most here in London, Have more now in the `Sonnets' than you paid for;He's put her there with all her poison on, To make a singing fiction of a shadow That's in his life a fact, and always will be.
But she's no care of ours, though Time, I fear, Will have a more reverberant ado About her than about another one Who seems to have decoyed him, married him, And sent him scuttling on his way to London, --With much already learned, and more to learn, And more to follow.Lord! how I see him now, Pretending, maybe trying, to be like us.
Whatever he may have meant, we never had him;He failed us, or escaped, or what you will, --And there was that about him (God knows what, --We'd flayed another had he tried it on us)That made as many of us as had wits More fond of all his easy distances Than one another's noise and clap-your-shoulder.
But think you not, my friend, he'd never talk!
Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened --Thereby acquiring much we knew before About ourselves, and hitherto had held Irrelevant, or not prime to the purpose.
And there were some, of course, and there be now, Disordered and reduced amazedly To resignation by the mystic seal Of young finality the gods had laid On everything that made him a young demon;And one or two shot looks at him already As he had been their executioner;And once or twice he was, not knowing it, --Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay And saying nothing....Yet, for all his engines, You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon Who strut and sun themselves and see around 'em A world made out of more that has a reason Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day;Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit But we mark how he sees in everything A law that, given we flout it once too often, Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads.
To me it looks as if the power that made him, For fear of giving all things to one creature, Left out the first, -- faith, innocence, illusion, Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam, --And thereby, for his too consuming vision, Empowered him out of nature; though to see him, You'd never guess what's going on inside him.
He'll break out some day like a keg of ale With too much independent frenzy in it;And all for cellaring what he knows won't keep, And what he'd best forget -- but that he can't.
You'll have it, and have more than I'm foretelling;And there'll be such a roaring at the Globe As never stunned the bleeding gladiators.
He'll have to change the color of its hair A bit, for now he calls it Cleopatra.
Black hair would never do for Cleopatra.
But you and I are not yet two old women, And you're a man of office.What he does Is more to you than how it is he does it, --And that's what the Lord God has never told him.
They work together, and the Devil helps 'em;They do it of a morning, or if not, They do it of a night; in which event He's peevish of a morning.He seems old;He's not the proper stomach or the sleep --And they're two sovran agents to conserve him Against the fiery art that has no mercy But what's in that prodigious grand new House.
I gather something happening in his boyhood Fulfilled him with a boy's determination To make all Stratford 'ware of him.Well, well, I hope at last he'll have his joy of it, And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves, And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover, Be less than hell to his attendant ears.
Oh, past a doubt we'll all go down to see him.
He may be wise.With London two days off, Down there some wind of heaven may yet revive him;But there's no quickening breath from anywhere Shall make of him again the poised young faun From Warwickshire, who'd made, it seems, already A legend of himself before I came To blink before the last of his first lightning.
Whatever there be, they'll be no more of that;The coming on of his old monster Time Has made him a still man; and he has dreams Were fair to think on once, and all found hollow.