I







My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;



Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,



Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,



Upon the breathless starlit air,



Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;



Fix every wandering thought upon



That quarter where all thought is done:



Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?







My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees



Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,



Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass



Unspotted by the centuries;



That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn



From some court-lady's dress and round



The wooden scabbard bound and wound,



Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.







My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man



Long past his prime remember things that are



Emblematical of love and war?



Think of ancestral night that can,



If but imagination scorn the earth



And intellect its wandering



To this and that and t'other thing,



Deliver from the crime of death and birth.







My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it



Five hundred years ago, about it lie



Flowers from I know not what embroidery—



Heart's purple—and all these I set



For emblems of the day against the tower



Emblematical of the night,



And claim as by a soldier's right



A charter to commit the crime once more.







My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows



And falls into the basin of the mind



That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,



For intellect no longer knows



Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—



That is to say, ascends to Heaven;



Only the dead can be forgiven;



But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.











II







My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.



What matter if the ditches are impure?



What matter if I live it all once more?



Endure that toil of growing up;



The ignominy of boyhood; the distress



Of boyhood changing into man;



The unfinished man and his pain



Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;







The finished man among his enemies?—



How in the name of Heaven can he escape



That defiling and disfigured shape



The mirror of malicious eyes



Casts upon his eyes until at last



He thinks that shape must be his shape?



And what's the good of an escape



If honour find him in the wintry blast?







I am content to live it all again



And yet again, if it be life to pitch



Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,



A blind man battering blind men;



Or into that most fecund ditch of all,



The folly that man does



Or must suffer, if he woos



A proud woman not kindred of his soul.







I am content to follow to its source



Every event in action or in thought;



Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!



When such as I cast out remorse



So great a sweetness flows into the breast



We must laugh and we must sing,



We are blest by everything,



Everything we look upon is blest.





