Or hurrying worker, each in its degree?
I am a small man, closed in a small space,
Expert in smallness, in the smallest things,
The inconsiderable and overlooked,
The curious and the ephemeral.
I like your small cell, Brother. Poverty,
Whiteness, a window, water, and your hand
Steadying the beaker at my cracking lips.
Thank you. It is enough.
Was a small space too, not like this, not bare,
A brilliant dusty hutch of mysteries,
A cabinet of curiosities.
What did my eyes first light on? There was scarce
Space for a crib between the treasure-chests,
The subtle-stoppered jars and hanging silks,
Feathers and bones and stones and empty gourds
Heaped pêle-mêle o'er the tables and the chairs.
A tray of moonstones spilled into a bowl
Of squat stone scarabs and small painted eyes
Of alien godlings winked from dusty shelves.
A mermaid swam in a hermetic jar
With bony fingers scraping her glass walls
And stiff hair streaming from her shrunken head.
Her dry brown breasts were like mahogany,
Her nether parts, coiled and confined, were dull,
Like ancient varnish, but her teeth were white.
And there was too a cockatrice's egg,
An ivory-coloured sphere, or almost sphere,
That balanced on a Roman drinking-cup
Jostling a mummy-cat, still wrapped around
With pitch-dark bandages from head to foot,
Sand-dried, but not unlike the swaddling-bands
My infant limbs were held in, I assume.
And your hands, will they? presently will fold
This husk here in its shroud and close my eyes,
Weakened by so much straining over motes
And specks of living matter, eyes that oped
In innocent lustre on that teasing heap
Of prizes reaped round the terrestrial globe
By resolute captains of the proud Dutch ships
That slip their anchors here in Amsterdam,
Sail out of mist and squalls, ride with the wind
To burning lands beneath a copper sun
Or never-melted mountains of green ice
Or hot dark secret places in the steam
Of equatorial forests, where the sun
Strikes far above the canopy, where men
And other creatures never see her light
Save as a casual winking lance that runs
A silver shaft between green dark and dark.
I had a project, as a tiny boy
To make a catalogue of all this pelf,
Range it, create an order, render it,
You might say, human-sized, by typing it
According to the use we made of it
Or meanings we saw in it. I would part
Medicine from myth, for instance, amulets
(Pure superstition) from the minerals-
Rose-quartz, quicksilver, we could grind to heal
Agues or tropic fever. Living things
Should have their own affined taxonomy,
Insect with insect, dusty bird with bird,
And all the eggs, from monstrous ostrich-globe
To chains of soft-shelled snakes' eggs, catalogued,
Measured with calipers and well set out
Gainst taffeta curtains, in curved wooden cups.
My father had a pothecary's shop
And seemed well-pleased at first to have a son
With such precocious yearnings of the mind.
He was ambitious for me. In his thoughts
He saw me doing human good, admired
By men, humble in God's eyes, eloquent
For truth and justice. When he saw that I
Was not the lawyer-son his hopes embraced
He fixed on a physician. "Who can mend
Man's ailing frame, succours his soul too," said
My father, a devout and worldly man,
"And keeps himself in bread and meat and wine.
Since fallen man must ail, the doctor's care
Is ever-wanted, this side of the grave."
But I had other leanings. Did they come
From scrupulous intellect, or glamorous spell
Cast by my infant nursery's denizens?
It seemed to me that true anatomy
Began not in the human heart and hands
But in the simpler tissues, primal forms,
Of tiny things that crept or coiled or flew.
The clue to life lay in the blind white worm
That eats away the complex flesh of men,
Is eaten by the farmyard bird who makes
A succulent dinner for another man
And so completes the circle. Life is One
I thought, and rational anatomy
Begins at the foot o' the ladder, on the rung
Nearest the fertile heat of Mother Earth.
Was it for that, or was it that my Soul
Had been possessed, in that dark Cabinet
By the black spider, big as a man's fist,
Tangible demon, in her sooty hair,
Or by the coal-black Moths of Barbary
Pierced through their frail dark wings, and crucified
With pins, for our amusement?
These were strange
And yet were forms of life, as I was too