Tireless.

Teniers, The Younger, Philosopher Reading, 1666

RIME

O scholar grey, with quiet eyes,

Reading the charactered pages, bright

With one tall candle’s flickering light,

In a turret chamber under the skies;

O scholar, learned in gramarye,

Have you seen the manifold things I see?

Have you seen the forms of tracèd towers

Whence clamorous voices challenge the hours:

Gaunt tree-branches, pitchy black

Against the long, wind-driven wrack

Of scurrying, shuddering clouds, that race

Ever across the pale moon’s face?

Have you heard the tramp of hurrying feet.

There beneath, in the shadowy street,

Have you heard sharp cries, and seen the flame

Of silvery steel, in a perilous game,

A perilous game for men to play,

Hid from the searching eyes of day?

Have you heard the great awakening breath,

Like trump that summons the saints from death,

Of the wild, majestical wind, which blows

Loud and splendid, that each man knows

Far, O far away is the sea,

Breaking, murmuring, stark and free?

All these things I hear and see,

I, a scholar of gramarye:

All are writ in the ancient books

Clear, exactly, and he that looks

Finds the night and the changing sea,

The years gone by, and the years to be:

(He that searches, with tireless eyes

In a turret-chamber under the skies)

Passion and joy, and sorrow and laughter,

Life and death, and the things thereafter.

Geoffrey Bache Smith