The mind of man

The mind of man invents but does not remember:
All must be marvellous, magical or grotesque.
In the songs and the tales that link up the generations,
The tenuous personal bond between present and past,
There is no remembering, only the son improving upon his father's stories.
An Irish cattle-raid blossoms as a national epic,
A family quarrel at last is a far-flung saga,
The merchants of Mycenae, the Trojan traders
Are heroes and half-gods, figures of high romance
And a commercial venture the pursuit of unattainable beauty.
Here is a fantasy, not the true recollection
Of man's continual heritage, the ultimate needs of his being—
Homes, fires and cooking-pots, temples, tools and toys,
Cornfields, the barn and cow-byre, the defeated cities,
And the tombs where each has grasped at a glimpse of survival.
The earth alone remembers, here loaded with an acropolis
Here grooved by earthworks, secretly holding a grave,
Pocked with the post-holes of some long-mouldered house,
Guarding the buried hoard or the offering cast to the gods—
Keeping eternally the memory of the small eternal things.

⋜1939