She saw the flame that burns in each of them, and she guarded it.
She tried somehow to reach the dark gropings toward light and articulation, of the blunt, the stolid, the shamefast.
She spoke a calm low word to the trembling racehorse, and he was still.
Thus, he made no confessions.
He was still prison-pent.
But he turned always to Margaret Leonard as toward the light: she saw the unholy fires that cast their sword-dance on his face, she saw the hunger and the pain, and she fed him — majestic crime! — on poetry.
Whatever of fear or shame locked them in careful silence, whatever decorous pretense of custom guarded their tongues, they found release in the eloquent symbols of verse.
And by that sign, Margaret was lost to the good angels.
For what care the ambassadors of Satan, for all the small fidelities of the letter and the word, if from the singing choir of earthly methodism we can steal a single heart — lift up, flame-tipped, one great lost soul to the high sinfulness of poetry?
The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of poetry was inextinguishably mixed with her blood, entombed in her flesh.
By the beginning of his fifteenth year Eugene knew almost every major lyric in the language.
He possessed them to their living core, not in a handful of scattered quotations, but almost line for line.
His thirst was drunken, insatiate: he added to his hoard entire scenes from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, which he read by himself in German; the lyrics of Heine, and several folk songs.
He committed to memory the entire passage in the Anabasis, the mounting and triumphal Greek which described the moment when the starving remnant of the Ten Thousand had come at length to the sea, and sent up their great cry, calling it by name.
In addition, he memorized some of the sonorous stupidities of Cicero, because of the sound, and a little of Caesar, terse and lean.
The great lyrics of Burns he knew from music, from reading, or from hearing Gant recite them.
But
“Tam O’Shanter” Margaret Leonard read to him, her eyes sparkling with laughter as she read:
“In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin’.”
The shorter Wordsworth pieces he had read at grammar school.
“My heart leaps up,”
“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” and
“Behold her, single in the field,” he had known for years; but Margaret read him the sonnets and made him commit “The world is too much with us” to memory.
Her voice trembled and grew low with passion when she read it.
He knew all the songs in Shakespeare’s plays, but the two that moved him most were:
“O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” which blew a far horn in his heart, and the great song from Cymbeline:
“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.”
He had tried to read all the sonnets, and failed, because their woven density was too much for his experience, but he had read, and forgotten, perhaps half of them, and remembered a few which burned up from the page, strangely, immediately, like lamps for him.
Those that he knew were:
“When, in the chronicle of wasted time,”
“To me, fair friend, you never can be old,”
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds,”
“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,”
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,”
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
“From you have I been absent in the spring,” and
“That time of year thou mayest in me behold,” the greatest of all, which Margaret brought him to, and which shot through him with such electric ecstasy when he came to
“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” that he could hardly hold his course unbroken through the rest of it.
He read all the plays save Timon, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, and King John, but the only play that held his interest from first to last was King Lear.
With most of the famous declamatory passages he had been familiar, for years, by Gant’s recitation, and now they wearied him.
And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the master’s swingeing wit, he felt vaguely were very dull.
He never had any confidence in Shakespeare’s humor — his Touchstones were not only windy fools, but dull ones.
“For my part I had rather bear with you than bear you; yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your purse.”
This sort of thing reminded him unpleasantly of the Pentlands.
The Fool in
“Lear” alone he thought admirable — a sad, tragic, mysterious fool.
For the rest, he went about and composed parodies, which, with a devil’s grin, he told himself would split the sides of posterity. Such as:
“Aye, nuncle, an if Shrove Tuesday come last Wednesday, I’ll do the capon to thy cock, as Tom O’Ludgate told the shepherd when he found the cowslips gone.
Dost bay with two throats, Cerberus?
Down, boy, down!”