c.
H. SISSON
Eppur Si Muove
1.
People I have not known enter my head,
Clear a room for themselves, and sit down,
Knowing that I shall welcome them, and the living
Are not likely to intrude while they are there.
Why so? Is this then a cavern for the dead?
Has it become so because under the frown
Of death there is no hope or forgiving,
Or in the hope that all there is fair?
The kingdom of the dead is no farther
Away than the centre of my mind.
It is there that the vanished speak, some word they said
Lights up or darkens my own vacancy.
It
matters little enough what ghosts are there,
There is always some pain or folly to find:
The folly is mine and not that of the dead,
Who nod together, and in their nodding agree.
2
I who no longer circulate
Where people think they think, or do,
Know there was never yet debate
Where either
pro
or
con
was true.
What statement ever was? What act
Rested on more than movement?
And, on the simple bread of fact,
Is butter an improvement?
3.
We who seem to others not what we are
But what they think we are: we the old,
Plausible travellers who have come from far,
Remember others of whom strange tales were told.
So generations find no secrets out,
The traveller came from nowhere after all:
The bold advance of thought became a rout.
It is some time 'since Adam had his fall.
