The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poetry, by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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Title: Poetry

Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

Release Date: March 7, 2004 [EBook #11496]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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POETRY

By

_Arthur Quiller-Couch_

"Trust in good verses then:
They only shall aspire,
When pyramids, as men
Are lost i'the funeral fire."

As the tale is told by Plato, in the tenth book of his _Republic_, one
Er the son of Arminius, a Pamphylian, was slain in battle; and ten days
afterwards, when they collected the bodies for burial, his body alone
showed no taint of corruption. His relatives, however, bore it off to
the funeral pile; and on the twelfth day, lying there, he returned to
life and told them what he had seen in the other world. Many wonders he
related concerning the dead, for example, with their rewards and
punishments: but most wonderful of all was the great Spindle of
Necessity which he saw reaching up into heaven with the planets
revolving around it in whorls of graduated width and speed, yet all
concentric and so timed that all complete the full circle punctually
together.--"The Spindle turns on the knees of Necessity: and on the rim
of each whorl sits perched a Siren, who goes round with it, hymning a
single note; the eight notes together forming one harmony."

* * * * *

The fable is a pretty one: but Er the Pamphylian comes back to report no
more than the one thing Man already grasps for a certainty amid his
welter of guesswork about the Universe--that its stability rests on
ordered motion--that the "firmament" stands firm on a balance of active
and tremendous forces somehow harmoniously composed. Theology asks "By
_whom_?": Philosophy inclines rather to guess "_How?_" Natural Science,
allowing that these questions are probably unanswerable, contents itself
with mapping and measuring what it can of the various forces. But all
agree about the harmony: and when a Newton discovers a single rule of it
for us, he but makes