from From Letter I

FROM LETTER |

Art is the product of a driving will,

In Western man more evident than in Eastern

Yet the passive Oriental fabricant of a hokku

Still directs it to a delicate repose.

Destiny is the shaper of the will,

Its sometime killer, in a long argument in time.

It is the fate of circumstances, the texture

Of the times, multifarious objectifications,

Pressures of families, friends, and state,

. Confrontation of the evil of managerial individuals,

Callousness and pestiferousness of mankind,

The turn of decades turning for the worse,

Political strife leading to stultifying war

That shapes the will to forms of art it takes

Or shapes the art despite the sharpening will.

It has often been said in extenuation

That poetry, if not of lies, is made of pseudo-statements

Incapable of proof: a web of phantasies

Leading man into the dangerous lands of Myth.

By devious travel he will voyage and will come

Into far sight of the mountains of illusion;

Between Scylla and Charybdis if not overwhelmed

By squalls of ancient fury, or by topmast felled,

On the rocky shores of fabulous Sicily

He will lose his men and wreck his boat.

Or struggling up the rocky cliff at Taormina

Where on the perilous topcrest sits the stamped jewel

That is the Greek theater with its slender columns,

A windowless realm of the late imagination

Looking across. one way the dialectical waters

While to the west the white summit of chaste Aetna

Burns in the blue dome ethereal, imponderable,

He will come to these sights derelict and spent

For he cannot tell the past from the present,

Maimed he will be, he will be thrown in chains

Killed by the cruel king like those who sought fame

Far from home by thus adventuring to die

In a land of olives under a white sky.

The counsel of the scientist in his study

Is not to voyage beyond the rule of measure,

By materialistic means to manipulate fact,

If, to be sure, he cannot manipulate the weather.

Poetry with his truth is irreconcilable

And the heart of poetry is unanalyzable.

The incapability of proof of poetic statement

Shows ancient courage in the heart of man, not meant

To unravel the secrets of the universe

But, by His will, to praise the Lord in verse.

For it is the unknowable and the unfathomable,

The unpredictable and the unreasonable

That reveal to man where he is able,

Who needs not give account to the unaccountable

Nor vaunt himself to say that he has the answer

To immortality, evil or good, the dance, the dancer.

The poet would always voyage to Cythére.

Across an infinitude of unstable air

His will to praise the realm of the unknown

Is stubborn and ancient in his marrow bone.

For it is by his myths, his dreams, these in his heart

That man knows himself man, and the poet makes his art.

If any proof be needed that he is wrong,

The most ancient wish of man was sung in song.

Poetry loves where there is fallacy

And lives where there is error and frailty,

It mirrors well, and spurns not, humanity,

A natural element as deep as is the sea.

Have no fear of it; it will live long

Though it slumber often in many a tongue,

And though, like man, it never will know God.