ASCENSION DAY 
3
Or, cradle be hardship, and finally coffin, ease, 
Love being filth? let us ask Aristophanes ! 
Or, heaven’s sun bake us, while Earth’s bugs and fleas kill us, 
Love the God’s scourge ?  I refer you to Aeschylus ! 
(Nay ! that’s a slip !  Say  we “Earth’s grim
 device, cool  
loss !—” 
Better the old Greek orthography !—Aischulos !14) 
Or, love be God’s cham
pagne’s foam ; deat h i n m an’s  
trough, hock lees, 
Pathos our port’s beeswing ? what answers Sophocles ? 
Brief, with love’s medicine let’s draught, bolus, globule us ! 
Wise and succinct bids, I think, Aristobulus.15 
Whether my Muse be Euterpe or Clio, 
Life, Death, and Love are all Batrachomyo16— 
Machia, what ? ho ! old extinct Alcibiades ? 
For me, do ut—God true, be mannikin liar !—des ! 
 
It’s rather hard, isn’t it, sir, to make sense of it ? 
Mine of so many pounds—pouch even pence of it ?17 
Try something easier,18 where the bard seems to me 
Seeking that light, which I find comes in dreams to me. 
Even as he takes to feasts to enlarge upon, 
So will I do too to launch my old barge upon 
Analyse, get hints from Newton19 or Faraday,20 
Use every weapon—love, scorn, reason, parody ! 
Just where he worships ?  Ah me ! shall his soul, 
Far in some glory, take hurt from a mole 
Grubbing i’ th’ ground ?  Shall his spirit not see, 
 Lightning to lightning, the spirit in me ? 
Parody ?  Shall not his spirit forgive 
Me, who shall love him as long as I live ? 
Love’s at its height in pure love ?  Nay, but after 
When the song’s light dissolves gently in laughter ! 
Then and then only the lovers may know 
Nothing can part them for ever.  And so, 
Muse, hover o’er me !  Apollo, above her ! 
 
I, of the Moderns, have let alone Greek.21 
Out of the way Intuition shall shove her. 
Spirit and Truth in my darkness I seek. 
Little by little they bubble and leak; 
Such as I have to the world I discover. 
Words—are they weak ones at best ?  They shall speak ! 
 
 
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Apology of 
poet. 
Skeleton of 
poem.  Valuable 
fact for use of 
lovers. 
Invocation. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Imperfect  
scholastic at-
tainements of 
author reme-
died by his  
great spiritual 
insight.  His 
intention.