Two short poems

Two poems this week, from an author hardly anyone seems to have heard of - Per Iter Tenebricosum and The Image Maker by Oliver St John Gogarty.  He was an extraordinary man, and if you want to be drunk on words for a space, I recommend his memoir As I Was Going Down Sackville Street.  He was Irish, very Irish, and he knew everyone in the arts and in politics, and he is Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses. He lived from 1878-1957, but he crammed hundreds of years of experience into those 80 years - a fine poet and story teller, a renowned (and heroic) surgeon, a national class bicyclist and a pioneering aviator.  Yeats thought him the finest lyric poet of the age (I beg to disagree, but he's worth reading), and so many stories are told about him that if I start, I may never stop.  But he performed a public pioneering larynxectomy, and recovered his own incriminating door key from the body of his friend Michael Collins when doing the autopsy on the Irish hero.

First, Per Iter Tenebricosum, in easy reference to Catullus' famous lyric:

Enough! Why should a man bemoan
A Fate that leads the natural way?
Or think himself a worthier one
Than those who braved it in their day?
If only gladiators died
Or heroes, Death would be his pride;
But have not little maidens gone,
And Lesbia's sparrow - all alone?

And now The Image Maker, about a sculptor who sees the statue in the stone, and who is helped by the stone itself to free his vision.

Hard is the stone, but harder still
The delicate preforming will
That guided by a dream alone,
Subdues and moulds the hardest stone,
Making the stubborn jade release
The emblem of eternal peace.

If but the will be firmly bent,
No stuff resists the mind's intent;
The adamant abets his skill
And sternly aids the artist's will
To clothe in perdurable pride
Beauty his transient eyes descried.

Comments

[short poems]

(If but the will be firmly bent,) there is an correct thing in your grammar

[glo]

I was just stopping by briefly because I was too curious to see what would be today's poem and I am still here...
I like very much both poems. It's philosophy in a versified shape, not something we use to read very often. And he tells things quite simply but so precisely and sharply.
I also like very much what you say about the man himself. If you have more to tell, please do it, your readers are always interested in reading what you could eventually write. I love the "He was Irish, very Irish". I quite understand it although I am not sure what I understand is exactly what you mean.
Have a nice week end, Mr Bagshaw!