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 | The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere |  |
Those vassal priests
Call me a dreamer. Hugo, you are none,
Have seen no visions. I can guess the cause:
Your whole life long is intellectual vision,
The seeing of the life of spiritual things;
We, men of action, when beside our hand
There lies no act, see visions. Once I saw them;
Not since Life's battle closed around my steps.
At Cluny was my first. You knew it not:
Matins were sung: in chapter sat the monks
You at their head. Your voice rang out denouncing
Monastic sloth. I marked beside you close
A vacant stall. Again I looked: and lo
Within that stall with sorrowing face He sate
Who wore the thorny crown: that hour He wore it,
And on a parchment wrote with hand that bled:
The words He wrote you spake.
Call me a dreamer. Hugo, you are none,
Have seen no visions. I can guess the cause:
Your whole life long is intellectual vision,
The seeing of the life of spiritual things;
We, men of action, when beside our hand
There lies no act, see visions. Once I saw them;
Not since Life's battle closed around my steps.
At Cluny was my first. You knew it not:
Matins were sung: in chapter sat the monks
292
Monastic sloth. I marked beside you close
A vacant stall. Again I looked: and lo
Within that stall with sorrowing face He sate
Who wore the thorny crown: that hour He wore it,
And on a parchment wrote with hand that bled:
The words He wrote you spake.
| The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere | |