William Marion Reedy
By Edgar Lee Masters
He sits before you silent as Buddha,
And then you say
This man is Rabelais.
And while you wonder what his stock is,
English or Irish, you behold his eyes
As big and brown as those desirable crockies
With which as boys we used to play.
And then you see the spherical light that lies
Just under the iris coloring,
Before which everything,
Becomes as plain as day.
If you have noticed the rolling jowls
And the face that speaks its chief
Delight in beer and roast beef
Before you have seen his eyes, you see
A man of fleshly jollity,
Like the friars of old in gowns and cowls
To make a show of scowls.
And when he speaks from an orotund depth that growls
In a humorous way like Fielding or Smollett
That turns in a trice to Robert La Follette
Or retraces to Thales of Crete,
And touches upon Descartes coming back
Through the intellectual Zodiac
That's something of a feat.
And you see that the eyes are really the man,
For the thought of him proliferates
This way over to Hindostan,
And that way descanting on Yeats.
With a word on Plato's symposium,
And a little glimpse of Theocritus,
Or something of Bruno's martyrdom,
Or what St. Thomas Aquinas meant
By a certain line obscure to us.
And then he'll take up Horace's odes
Or the Roman civilization;
Or a few of the Iliad's episodes,
Or the Greek deterioration.
Or skip to a word on the plasmic jelly,
Which Benjamin Moore and others think
Is the origin of life. Then Shelley
Comes in a for a look of understanding.
Or he'll tell you about the orientation
Of the ancient dream of Zion.
Or what's the matter with Bryan.
And while the porter is bringing a drink
Something into his fancy skips
And he talks about the Apocalypse,
Or a painter or writer now unknown
In France or Germany who will soon
Have fame of him through the whole earth blown.
It's not so hard a thing to be wise
In the lore of books.
It's a different thing to be all eyes,
Like a lighthouse which revolves and looks
Over the land and out to sea:
And a lighthouse is what he seems to me!
Sitting like Buddha spiritually cool,
Young as the light of the sun is young,
And taking the even with the odd
As a matter of course, and the path he's trod
As a path that was good enough.
With a sort of transcendental sense
Whose hatred is less than indifference,
And a gift of wisdom in love.
And who can say as he classifies
Men and ages with his eyes
With cool detachment: this is dung,
And that poor fellow is just a fool.
And say what you will death is a rod.
But I see a light that shines and shines
And I rather think it's God.