Poetry

And if all fails - there is still poetic language - - - 

“It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.” csl

The Philosopher - C S Lewis Poems

Who shall be our prophet then,

Chosen from all the sons of men

To lead his fellows on the way

Of hidden knowledge, delving deep

To nameless mysteries that keep

Their secret from the solar day!

Or who shall pierce with surer eye!

This shifting veil of bittersweet

And find the real things that lie

Beyond this turmoil, which we greet

With such a wasted wealth of tears?

Who shall cross over for us the bridge of fears

And pass in to the country where the ancient Mothers dwell?

Is it an elder, bent and hoar

Who, where the waste Atlantic swell

On lonely beaches makes its roar,

In his solitary tower

Through the long night hour by hour

Pores on old books with watery eye

When all his youth has passed him by,

And folly is schooled and love is dead

And frozen fancy laid abed,

While in his veins the gradual blood

Slackens to a marish flood?

For he rejoiceth not in the ocean's might,

Neither the sun giveth delight,

Nor the moon by night

Shall call his feet to wander in the haunted forest lawn.

He shall no more rise suddenly in the dawn

When mists are white and the dew lies pearly

Cold and cold on every meadow,

To take his joy of the season early,

The opening flower and the westward shadow,

And scarcely can he dream of laughter and love,

They lie so many leaden years behind.

Such eyes are dim and blind,

And the sad, aching head that nods above

His monstrous books can never know

The secret we would find.

But let our seer be young and kind

And fresh and beautiful of show,

And taken ere the lustyhead

And rapture of his youth be dead;

Ere the gnawing, peasant reason

School him over-deep in treason

To the ancient high estate

Of his fancy's principate,

That he may live a perfect whole,

A mask of the eternal soul,

And cross at last the shadowy bar

To where the ever-living are.

Cheers,

Paulo