In Search of Man

Some labyrinths curl round like a sea shell;

Even in Crete, that was the ancient form

That Ariadne's wreath led Theseus down

Before her brilliance ravelled to a thread.

As far and deep, in such a sounding place,

Like a black pool or the Minoan hole,

Dark as the Minotaur I have walked with him,

Careless of that faint wraith my landling image

That heard our tread like flukes and loved the sea.

What is a man? Not only one of those

Images. I listen for water, voices on voices

As of the multitudinous truth of inmost

Sentience, other breath than any language,

Music that, if it visited our tongues,

Would underhum like a voice amid surds.

This is, perhaps, a sound that is something like

The impossible definition of a man.

But who of all that listen can hear the sea?

Ranging the gamut of a billion shores

But falling, for the immemorial ear,

Only on one, it is heard after a fashion.

It speaks, like a pebble, of old times

And of the ancient principle of attrition

Liquid and plosive in immediate shingle.

It has nothing to say about the deep

Unless by saying nothing, or all but nothing,

In full measures of ease that like a heart's rest

Gather the energies of the overbeat

Out of complexity.

Though Theseus lived,

Who saw the body of dead Minotaur?

I too have killed fears in a labyrinth:

Brindled morays, fishes with necks like bulls'

Under a wave, shadows. But not that shadow

The black sail of returning Theseus mourned-

For one had died; in the doubtful labyrinth

An image died. It had a form the god

Ocean in ancient ages had, the bull

Neck, the bull head.

What is a man, Theseus?

Aegeus the king your father believed the sail

Darkening toward him over the Aegean.

However that blow came, the abrupt brunt

Shouldered him from the rock: he grieved and died.

You mourned, in purple. Called by a later shame-

Ariadne's sister Phaedra, your wife, roped high

Like a mute bell swaying for Hippolytus-

A bull out of the sea punished your pride.

Again you heard shores crying ai! ai! as when

You left the sister of the bull for bride,

On stony Naxos, to the ambiguous god.