For your pleasure The Truly Great By Stephen Spender I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns, Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song. And who hoarded from the Spring branches The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms. What is precious, is never to forget The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth. Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light Nor its grave evening demand for love. Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit. Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are fêted by the waving grass And by the streamers of white cloud And whispers of wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour. I Think Constantly of Those Who Were Truly Great by Michael Blumenthal and, to be perfectly honest, it bums me out. So many great ones! —libidinal heroes, idealists, warrior-chieftains, revolutionaries, fabulists of all sorts, even the great Irish pig farmers and Armenian raisin growers —and who, I ask myself, am I by comparison? Calmed by Valium, urged on by Viagra, uplifted by Prozac, I go about my daily rounds, a quotidian member of the quotidian hierarchy, a Perseus with neither a war nor a best friend, and sink to the depths of despair on the broken wings of my own mundanity. If only some god had given me greatness, I surely would have made something of it— perhaps a loftier, more humble poem than this, or some übermenschliche gesture that would reveal my superiority to the ordinary beings and things of this world. But here I am now, one of the earths mere Sancho Panzas, leading those heroic others through the world on their magnificent horses, merely turning the page, dreaming my own small deeds into their magnificent arms.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 15:09:20 +0000
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