That wasn’t the whole truth, the truth was that both he and Arthur had seeped into his poem, had become parts of its fabric, a matter-moulded kind of half-life he sometimes thought it was, something not independent, but not part of each, not a handclasp, but a kind of vigorous parasite, like mistletoe on dying oaks with its milky berries and its mysterious evergreen leaves. He had had all sorts of worries and wicked thoughts about his poem. Perhaps he was using it to keep alive a memory and a love it would have been stronger and more manly to let lie. Perhaps he was in some wrong way using his beloved to subserve his own gain, his own fame, or more subtly, making something fantastically beautiful out of the horror of Arthur’s dissolution, which it would have been wiser, more honest, to stare at in dumb and truthful uncomprehending pain, until its hurtful brightness either faded like a fire eaten away, or caused him to drop his own eyes. You could not make a man into a poem, neither the singer nor the sung, neither the rippling throat nor the still corpse.
And yet, and yet, and yet, if there was one thing he knew, it was that his poem was beautiful and alive and true, like an angel. If the air was full of the ghostly voices of his ancestors, his poem let them sing out again, Dante and Theocritus, Milton and the lost Keats, whose language was their afterlife. He saw it as a spinning circular cage in which he was a trapped bird, a cage like a globe, rimmed with the bright lines of the horizons of dawn and dusk. He saw it as a kind of world, a heavy globe, spinning onwards in space, studded with everything there was, mountains and dust, tides and trees, flies and grubs and dragons in slime, swallows and larks and carrier-birds, raven-glossed darkness and summer air, men and cows and infants and violets, all held together with threads of living language like strong cables of silk, or light. The world was a terrible lump of which his poem was a shining simulacrum. The world burst and slid and expanded into shapelessness of which his poem was a formally delightful image.
