Plurality

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun

The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;

World is other and other, world is here and there,

Parmenides would smother life for lack of air

Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks—

No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,

Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,

All your foes are friends and all your days are nights

And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all

And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.

The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives

And nothing that we do, make or become survives,

His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream

Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme

Completeness means be chokes each orifice with tight

Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white

All-white Universal, refusing to allow

Division or dispersal—Eternity is now

And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see

Postulating a dumb static identity

Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without

Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt,

Action along with error, growth along with gaps;

If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse.

No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear

That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year,

That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because

It is something that began and is not what it was,

Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled,

Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world,

Its entity a denial of all that is not it,

Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit,

An absolute and so defiant of the One

Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done,

Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought

And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought.

World is not like that, world is full of blind

Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind,

Swollen or diminished according to the dice,

Foaming, never finished, never the same twice.

You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form—

Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm

And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained,

Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained,

Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet

Would not be worth achieving if the world were set

Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb

World should find its voice for good and God become

Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means

Something but must fall unless there intervenes

Between that meaning and the matter it should fill

Time’s revolving hand that never can be still.

Which being so and life a ferment, you and I

Can only live by strife in that the living die,

And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim

Only to what a bird can find within the frame

Of momentary flight (the value will persist

But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).

Man is man because he might have been a beast

And is not what he was and feels himself increased,

Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet

Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget

The means within the end and man is truly man

In that he would transcend and flout the human span:

A species become rich by seeing things as wrong

And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong.

Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled

By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,

Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,

Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux

And so he must continue, raiding the abyss

With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,

Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick

Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,

Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,

Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,

But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power

Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,

Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch,

Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

Source: The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Oxford University Press, 1967)