PYTHAGORAS planned it. Why did the people stare? <br />His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move <br />In marble or in bronze, lacked character. <br />But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love <br />Of solitary beds, knew what they were, <br />That passion could bring character enough, <br />And pressed at midnight in some public place <br />Live lips upon a plummet-measured face. <br />No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men <br />That with a mallet or a chisel' modelled these <br />Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down <br />All Asiatic vague immensities, <br />And not the banks of oars that swam upon <br />The many-headed foam at Salamis. <br />Europe put off that foam when Phidias <br />Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass. <br />One image crossed the many-headed, sat <br />Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow, <br />No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat <br />Dreamer of the Middle Ages. Empty eyeballs knew <br />That knowledge increases unreality, that <br />Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show. <br />When gong and conch declare the hour to bless <br />Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness. <br />When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side. <br />What stalked through the post Office? What intellect, <br />What calculation, number, measurement, replied? <br />We Irish, born into that ancient sect <br />But thrown upon this filthy modern tide <br />And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, <br />Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace <br />The lineaments of a plummet-measured face. <br />April 9,<br /><br />William Butler Yeats<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-statues/
