The ancient symbols will be nothing then.

We shall have gone behind the symbols

To that which they symbolized, away

From the rumors of the speech-full domes,

To the chatter that is then the true legend,

Like glitter ascended into fire.

VI

Master of the world and of himself,

He came to this by knowledge or

Will come. His mind presents the world

And in his mind the world revolves.

The revolutions through day and night,

Through wild spaces of other suns and moons,

Round summer and angular winter and winds,

Are matched by other revolutions

In which the world goes round and round

In the crystal atmospheres of the mind,

Light’s comedies, dark’s tragedies,

Like things produced by a climate, the world

Goes round in the climates of the mind

And bears its floraisons of imagery.

The mind renews the world in a verse,

A passage of music, a paragraph

By a right philosopher: renews

And possesses by sincere insight

In the John-begat-Jacob of what we know,

The flights through space, changing habitudes.

In the generations of thought, man’s sons

And heirs are powers of the mind,

His only testament and estate.

He has nothing but the truth to leave.

How then shall the mind be less than free

Since only to know is to be free?

VII

The living man in the present place,

Always, the particular thought

Among Plantagenet abstractions,

Always and always, the difficult inch,

On which the vast arches of space

Repose, always, the credible thought

From which the incredible systems spring,

The little confine soon unconfined

In stellar largenesses—these things

Are the manifestations of a law

That bends the particulars to the abstract,

Makes them a pack on a giant’s back,

A majestic mother’s flocking brood,

As if abstractions were, themselves

Particulars of a relative sublime.

This is not poet’s ease of mind.

It is the fate that dwells in truth.

We obey the coaxings of our end.

VIII

What is the shape of the sibyl? Not,

For a change, the englistered woman, seated

In colorings harmonious, dewed and dashed

By them: gorgeous symbol seated

On the seat of halidom, rainbowed,

Piercing the spirit by appearance,

A summing up of the loftiest lives

And their directing sceptre, the crown

And final effulgence and delving show.

It is the sibyl of the self,

The self as sibyl, whose diamond,

Whose chiefest embracing of all wealth

Is poverty, whose jewel found

At the exactest central of the earth

Is need. For this, the sibyl’s shape

Is a blind thing fumbling for its form,

A form that is lame, a hand, a back,

A dream too poor, too destitute

To be remembered, the old shape

Worn and leaning to nothingness,

A woman looking down the road,

A child asleep in its own life.

As these depend, so must they use.

They measure the right to use. Need makes

The right to use. Need names on its breath

Categories of bleak necessity,

Which, just to name, is to create