Not entirely enviable, however envied;
And early outgrew the enjoyment of their envy,
For other preoccupations, some quite as absurd.
Not always edifying in his actions : touchy
And dull by turns, prejudiced, often not strictly
Truthful, with a weakness for petty meddling,
For black sheep, churlish rancours, and out-of-hand
damning.
The messes he got himself in were of his own devising;
With all the faults he saw through in the rest of us;
As we have taken pains, and a certain delight, in
proving,
Not denying his strength, but still not sure quite where
it was;
But luck was with him too, whatever that is,
For his rightful deserts, far from destroying him,
Turned out to be just what he’d needed, and he used
them.
Opportunist, shrewd waster, half calculation,
Half difficult child; a phoney, it would seem,
Even to his despairs, were it not for the work, and that
certain
Sporadic but frightening honesty allowed him
By those who loathed him most. Not nice in the home,
But a few loved him. And he loved. Who? What?
Some still
Think they know, as some thought they knew then,
which was just as well.
In his lifetime what most astonished those
Acquainted with him, was the amount of common
Detail he could muster, and with what intimate ease,
As though he knew it all from inside. For when
Had he seen it? They recalled him as one who most
often
Seemed slow, even stupid, not above such things surely,
But absent, with that air maybe part fake, and part
shifty.
Yet famously cursed in his disciples:
So many, emulous, but without his unique powers,
Could only ape and exaggerate his foibles.
And he bewildered them as he did no others,
Though they tried to conceal it: for, like mirrors
In a fun-house, they were static, could never keep up
with him,
Let alone predict. But stranded on strange shores
following him.
So the relief, then the wide despair, when he was gone;
For not only his imitators did he leave feeling
Naked, without voice or manner of their own:
For over a generation his ghost would come bullying
Every hand: all modes seemed exhausted, and he had
left nothing
Of any importance for them to do,
While what had escaped him eluded them also.
For only with his eyes could they see, with his ears hear
The world. He had made it. And hard, now, to believe
In the invention: all seems so styleless, as though it had
come there
By itself, since the errors and effort are in their grave.
But real: here we are walking in it. Oh, what we can
never forgive
Is the way every leaf calls up to our helpless
remembrance
Our reality and its insupportable innocence.
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