The Wild Tears Fall

Tell me you

That sing in the black-thorn

Out of what Mind

Your melody springs.

Is it the World-soul

Throbs like a fountain

Up through the throat

Of an elf with wings?



Five sweet notes

In a golden order,

Out of that deep realm

Quivering through,

Flashed like a phrase

Of light through darkness.

But Who so ordered them?

Tell me, Who?



You whose throats

In the rain drenched orchard

Peal your joys

In a cadenced throng;

You whose wild notes,

Fettered by beauty,

Move like the stars

In a rounded song;



Yours is the breath

But Whose is the measure,

Shaped in an ecstasy

Past all art?

Yours is the spending;

Whose is the treasure?

Yours is the blood-beat;

Whose is the heart?



Minstrels all

That have woven your houses

Of withies and twigs

With a Mind in wrought,

Ye are the shuttles;

But out of what Darkness

Gather your thoughtless

Patterns of thought?



Bright eyes glance

Through your elfin doorways,

Roofed with rushes,

And lined with moss.

Whose are the voiceless

pangs of creation?

Yours is the wild bough:

Whose is the Cross?



Carols of light

From a lovelier kingdom,

Gleams of a music

On earth unheard,

Scattered like dew

By the careless wayside,

Pour through the lifted

Throat of a bird.




Where does learning begin? When does one begin to be aware of the consist flow of sheer knowing into his soul? Sight, sound, taste, touch—all inescapable ports of vessels that our minds struggle to name and our hearts to love or reject. Or is knowledge not the reaction of experience, but the struggle of the incorporeal soul to remember herself and her true home in the world of sensation around her?

The modern age hates giants. The magnificent man is the inherent proof against democracy, and democracy is all-good. Therefore democracy has always been good (alas, we must be absolutists even in the face of Hegelian relativism), and if it has always been good, there can never have been giants. Thus, to say that Plato and Aristotle divided the worlds of belief between themselves sends up shrieks of denunciation from the modern man. Such a statement is surely the phlegm of Western chauvinism stirred with the obsequious spittle of traditionalism.

Yet, erase the faces of modern thinkers. Forget these two men were far too near to each other to achieve such divergence. Assume not that there could never have been two giants of thought, one with his head touching the dome of the sky, the other with his feet buried in the molten hell of Earth.



The Soul Only Knows: I by Rachel Rudd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at foolishnessntears.blogspot.com.